


The Monster Riding Shotgun

by j2annon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dark Sam Winchester, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Consent, Gore, Hurt Sam Winchester, M/M, Power Dynamics, Rough Sex, Serial Killers, Violence, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-16
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:22:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j2annon/pseuds/j2annon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Wesson is an IT man at Sandover Bridge & Iron Inc. Everyone is completely oblivious to the fact that his extracurriculars include murder—and a serious blood kink. That is, everyone besides one high level executive named Dean Smith. An AU based on Dexter.</p><p>Warnings/spoilers/enticements: violence, gore, graphic sex, dub-con, dark!Sam (like super SUPER dark)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

 

_**THEN:** _  
__November 2, 1983_ _  
__Lawrence, Kansas__

 

* * *

 

  
His head tilted sharply to the right at the all-too familiar electric crackling sound, cutting into the rhythm of dried-out branches scratching against frozen glass, the only sound that had previously disrupted the otherwise silent night.

His eyes had been trained on the window in front of him for a while, seeing and unseeing at the same time, but now they snapped into focus as his pupils pulsed in reaction to the flickering light inside.

The moment was almost here.

He let his head drop as he rose, still keeping his eyes glued to the Winchester residence, yet allowing himself this very human gesture of surrender. Surrender to the sadness this task brought him, surrender to the fact that although it was far from perfect, it was the only thing he  _could_ do.

Not a good solution, no. But better than any others. Certainly a whole lot better than one brother being broken on the rack in Hell, and the other losing himself—or at least all the parts that made him _him_ —in the devil’s cage.

He straightened to the full height the human flesh of his vessel afforded as he let his wings drop away to unfurl behind him, watching. 

Soon, Mary Winchester’s screams would wake this sleepy neighborhood.

Soon, that frost-tipped window would be filled with the garish orange light of the flames of Hell.

Two scared little boys would come running out of the house soon after. The older will be clutching onto the younger and whispering promises of _It’ll be okay_ , trying to convince himself as much as the little one pressed tightly to his body.

And it  _was_ going to be okay.

This time around, those boys wouldn’t have to spend their days living out a constant loop of this scene, convincing themselves by trying to convince each other that everything would be okay.

This time they’d have an angel— _their_ angel, a  _friend,_ even— make sure that they _would_ indeed be okay.

The whisper of fluttering feathers had barely announced the arrival at his side when an all too familiar voice sounded at his ear.  
  
“You do realize you’re missing the point, don’t you?”  
  
His shoulders stiffened in response, but he kept his eyes trained straight ahead on his target, watching the tell-tale flickering of the faint lights inside.  
  
“Anna.”  
  
He would have been content to wait her out, were it not for the very strong possibility that she might interfere at the most crucial of moments, a moment that was almost _here_.  
  
“If I had wished for your opinion on the matter I would have told you so,” he informed her, voice cold and dangerously calm.  
Her laugh was colder than the night air, surprising him when he saw how much softness was in her eyes, after she’d circled around to face him.  
  
“What you’re doing here—”  
  
She shook her head, voice rasping as she paused for a moment.  
  
“You are taking away their choice; their right to choose their own path.”  
  
She’d laid it at his feet, waiting. When his gaze moved away from her, back to the Winchesters’ window, she didn’t take it as the dismissal he’d hoped she would. Rather, it only seemed to make her agitation grow, if the huffing of her breath served as any indication.  
  
“Surely, you can see that this is not the answer!”  
  
“Really? From where I’m standing, it seems like an excellent solution—to many of our problems.”  
  
His voice sounded harsh against the silence that surrounded them. He let it hang there, before continuing more softly.  
  
“If they never learn of angels and demons and every other monster that walks this earth...well then, that means Dean will never have to even so much as consider bargaining his own soul for his brother’s life. And that means neither Winchester will have to end up as no more than a pawn in our apocalypse game, now doesn’t it?”  
  
He stepped forward, making it clear that he wasn’t really waiting on—or looking for—an answer.  
  
“Saving the Winchesters from a lifetime of nothing but pain and misery and preventing the apocalypse? I’d say that’s a whole lot better than what we have now.”  
  
She didn’t respond.  
  
The stillness stretched heavy and thick between them, and he knew that time was running out, could all but hear the seconds ticking by. Even so, she refused to budge. He could still feel her presence there, behind him. He threw one last, quick glance her way, as much a plea for understanding and obedience as the words that followed it.  
  
“Sometimes there is no right choice, Anna. Only bad, and worse.”  
  
He didn’t have to say the words _Please, you must let me do this,_ _you have to let this pass,_ any more than he needed to turn around to know that he was once again alone.  
  
But not for very long.  
  
When the boys come running out of the burning house, the angel easily swooped them up and carried them away before they even had so much as a second to stare up at the flames.  
  
While he may have convinced young Dean easily enough, albeit aided by the impressive full span of his unfurled wings, that he was in fact an angel sent to watch over them, and that he would indeed deliver him and his brother to a safer place—he still could not prevent the way that Dean never took his eyes away from the flames, not until it was too far away to see. Nor could he ignore the way that Dean still chanted those words to his brother, _It’ll be okay, Sammy, it’ll be okay_ , prayer and oath all rolled into one.  
  
All the angel _could_ do was to focus on completing his task, on doing everything in his power to make sure that in the end, Sam and Dean really _would_ be okay.

 

**::**

  
He waited until sleep dragged their consciousness away to imprint their ribs with the markings that would keep them safe, hidden from everyone of his kind.  
  
And with that done, it was easier to separate them, and then to place each of them in their own new home, with a family  that would care for them and love them, in a world where monsters stayed in books—where they belonged.  
  
It wasn’t easy. No. Not by any means.  
  
But it _was_ best.  
  
It would be in the long run, anyways.  
  
Yes, Sam Wesson and Dean Smith would grow up with far too many miles between them and completely unaware of each other’s existence…and they would be all the safer for it.  
  
They would indeed be okay. The angel would make certain of that.


	2. Chapter 2

**NOW:**  
22 Years Later

* * *

  


_Tonight’s the night. Has to happen. Just as it had happened before. Just as it would happen again, and again._

Hunger.  
  
You could feel it fill the room, clinging and desperate. It was like its own physical entity, pulling and shoving people at each other with its incessant cry to be fed, their eyes and hands so unabashedly demanding, pleading, hoping, praying for what their owners wanted to have, to take.  
  
All starving for something different—hunger for attention, hunger for acceptance. Hunger to feel beautiful, wanted, powerful, in control. To remember. To forget. To feel everything, anything. To feel nothing at all.  
  
But above all, determined and desperate to feed the hunger, only to end up succeeding in making it that much stronger, bigger, that much harder to ignore.  
  
It was the same, this hunger. The same for each and every one of us: we were all ruled by it, even me.  
  
 _Especially me._  
  
You see, I was far from unfamiliar with this hunger. After all, it _was_ what brought me here tonight, a bar like a hundred, even a thousand other bars in this city and across the country, filled with too many bodies, pressed too close together yet not close enough, never close enough—still clawing and clutching and forever grasping for more, more, more.  
  
And among the unsuspecting undulating masses, there were always a few monsters.  
  
Like me.  
  
Hiding in plain sight, camouflaged behind the requisite all-American draft beer worn like the de facto badge of normalcy, smiling their easy smiles that are only one or two shades over practiced.  
  
Yet still, they managed to pass undetected, not even tripping the slightest of alarms. Maybe it was the hunger in their eyes, just as demanding and desperate as everyone else’s, that made their disguise so easy to buy.  
  
But I wasn’t fooled.  
  
I could recognize it instantly, could in fact spot it with my eyes closed. It takes one to know one, as they say. Because as much as it was in the cold flatness of the eyes and the cruel turn of the smile—it was in the smell. That scent that was so easy to recognize yet hard to pin down as anything specific—it was all sharpness and power without the slightest hint of sweetness, a lifetime of giving into their darkest desires had no doubt worn away any remaining softness in these fellow travelers of mine.  
  
The average observer may have labeled them as drug addicts, whores, sexual predators, misfits, losers, or any other variety of psychologically dependent specimen in between. But I knew. I knew that was just the skin they wore; that underneath it they were animals just like me, nothing human left in them, reduced down to just their hunger, until that was all that was left inside.  
  
They _were_ The Hunger. Their blood reeked of it.  
  
And it smelled utterly delicious.   
  
It called to me.       

  


**::**

  


I spotted her within minutes, knew she was the one as soon as I laid eyes on her.  
  
It didn’t take much longer for me to catch _her_ eye, even less to draw her to me with a flash of my best awkward-shy smile. She was at my side within the span of a few breaths, if that, and it really wasn’t much longer at all until she gave me exactly what I’d wanted all along—the very thing I’d come in here for—without me ever having to even ask for it.  
  
See the trick is, to make them think it’s _their_ idea.  
  
It was just too easy.  
  
All you had to was blush and give a shy duck your head, buck your hips into theirs with the appearance of barely-contained lust when they make the inevitable suggestion to go somewhere a little more ‘private’.  
  
After all, it _is_ what it’s all been leading up to since the moment their eyes were snagged by the schoolboy dimples of my grin. They’ve known it just as well as me. And if they simply aren’t aware of the fact that _I know_ they know? Well doesn’t that just make things a whole lot easier for me.  
  
Not to mention fun.  
  
It worked every damn time.  
  
And this one was certainly no exception.  
  
In fact, she was all but skipping as she led me by the hand out the front door and down the street, then into a dark, secluded alley. She suspected nothing, not even when I pushed her against the wall and took control of the situation in a way that was far too practiced for the shy virgin act I’d fed her up till now.  
  
When I pinned her wrists above her head and buried my face into her neck, she still had no clue—all it earned me was the wanton thrusting of her hips and needy mmmm’s and ahhhhhh’s to go along with them. I grinned into her skin at her complete and utter obliviousness, even as I pulled out my knife and raised it into position. It wasn’t until that very moment—that first neat, shallow cut—that she finally sensed something was not quite right, eyes popping open at the tearing of her flesh.  
  
But even then, she wasn’t quite there yet—eyes filled with confusion, still a few long steps behind understanding.  
  
I gave her a patient smile. _That’s okay. You’ll get there soon enough, sweetheart._  
  
Flattening my tongue against her skin, I traced the line of the cut I’d just made from point to point, bottom to top, watching her eyes grow comically wide as I licked up every drop of blood that had managed to squeeze out. With my chin resting at the dip of her shoulder, I smiled again, and I didn’t even need to feel her involuntary full body jerk to sense the feral glint my smile had taken on.  
  
I held her gaze, let her struggle there behind her eyes just long enough to start planning out an exit strategy, before my grin grew so wide that it practically split my face apart. It was then that I let the knife sink deep, slicing down hard, quick and vicious before replacing the blade with my mouth.  
  
She tasted good, squirmed and twisted underneath me even better. And oh, how sweet the sound of her muffled screams underneath my hand.  
  
She _felt_ so very good—well, made _me_ feel so very good—that I actually almost regretted not fucking her first.  
  
 _Almost._  
  
But then her struggling began to lose focus, the sound of her protests fell away, and I knew that it was time.  
  
I lifted my eyes so that I could watch her in these final moments, even as I bore down on her neck hard and brutal as ever, greedily sucking down all that she had left to give me. After all, that moment when the struggle died in their eyes...well, it had a way of making those last drops taste that much sweeter.  
  
Trust me, there is absolutely nothing better than that splintering second when they suddenly and irrevocably realize they are not the hunter, but the hunt _ed_. That mixture and rapid mutation of shock and fear and anger and resignation—it has a tendency to twist the human face in the most exquisite way.  
  
If ever there was a time when I could bring myself to call my fellow monster truly beautiful, surely this was it.  
  
But hey, that _could_ just be the blood talking.

  


**::**

  


It’s amazing how blind humans can be, how they see without seeing.  
  
It’s the only way monsters like me can get away with what we do—after all, no one really wants to believe that they stood right next to a killer, or brushed shoulders with him as they passed him by. And so they see only what they want to see.  
  
It’s the reason why I can walk over to my car in the middle of the night (or in the early morning hours, as the case may be), while dragging along a lifeless body beside me, without drawing so much as a suspicious glance.  
  
Easy enough then, to sling a limp arm around my shoulder, to use my other arm to support an unmoving waist. As easy as it is, I suppose, for those occasional passersby to see it as the uncoordinated stumblings of a couple of drunks. Nothing unusual there, certainly nothing that would warrant more than the most cursory of glances.  
  
Because really, who wants to think that they’ve just walked past a murderer and his fresh  kill?  
  
It’s the same reason why when I torch this body only a few minutes from now, no one will ever notice the bright orange of the flames against the black of the night’s sky, in much the same way that they won’t notice me until I’m long gone, and that body is no more than ash and dust.  
  
And so tonight I stowed away the body of my latest victim just as easily as I had all the ones that had come before her. Honestly, I’d lost count. Probably somewhere in the hundreds, if you wanna put me on the spot.  
  
The body slipped into the opened bag in the back of my car which had been laid out there for just such a purpose. Not a moment later, I was all settled in the driver’s seat, starting up the car and safely belted in just like any other responsible, law-abiding citizen on their way home from a late night out on the town. Except, you know, that instead of heading home I was heading towards the nearest cemetery. I laughed, and tried not to notice how relaxed and free the sound was, how light it felt in my chest.  
  
This...this was always the best part, my favorite part of the night. I won’t lie and tell you that I don’t enjoy the taste of blood on my tongue. Of course I do. Obviously. I mean, it _is_ what drives me to do what I do.  
  
But you see the blood—it pleases my body, not my mind. In fact, my mind is completely absent from the proceedings. Or perhaps, I should be more exact and say that my mind goes completely still, sits back and watches as that dark thing within me reaches out, grows and stretches until it’s shoved its way  into every pore of my skin and twisted itself through every fiber of my body.  
  
 _Everything is the hunger and the hunger is everything._  
  
And while I can’t deny that there _is_ pure pleasure in that—like nothing else in this world could ever be, could ever even come _close_ to being—it is also nothing more than my body gorging on the thing which it hungers for most.  
  
There is no skill there, no finesse; just take, take, take.  
  
But after it’s done, when that darkness is pulsing and blissed out, fed and content—that’s when my mind _can_ take over. And my mind, you see, it’s as precise, as exact, as neat as that beast inside me is not.  
  
If giving in to the hunger is about giving up control, cleaning up after is about taking it back. I have grown not only skilled at it over the years, but also efficient. I can’t help but take pleasure in that; not only in the way that I can wipe every trace of myself, any evidence that I was ever really there, make myself disappear, but also in the act itself, in the way that every movement my body makes is so spectacularly controlled—calculated, measured, the minimum that it has to be, after the recklessness, the overbearing sloppiness of the monster.  
  
And so tonight, after I pulled into the cemetery and gave it a quick scan, assuring myself that it was sufficiently dark and there was no one else lurking about, I let myself sink into the task at hand, into the comforting ritual of it.  
  
The engine was cut and the door swung open and shut closed with a fluidity that blended it into one movement. I was at the trunk, pulling out my bag and hoisting it over my shoulder, then doing the very same thing to the somewhat larger bag that held my new (though dearly departed) friend. All that was left to grab then was my good ol’ trusty shovel, and we were off.  
  
Finding a final resting place for my friend was easy enough. While there are always many graves to choose from, I have always gone for the ones that appear the least flashy—a small gravestone usually means a small burial budget, and even smaller number of people who might care enough for the deceased to notice that their final resting place had been disturbed.  
  
Digging the requisite few feet went fast and easy, as it so often tends to do: the rhythm of the manual labor lulling me into a quite soothing mindlessness. With that done, it was only a matter of dropping the body in, and then getting the necessary tools out of my bag.  
  
I laid them out in front of me thoughtfully, carefully. As always.  
  
A can of lighter fluid.  
  
A Zippo.  
  
Not much, I will admit. But it does the job.  
  
Hey, what can I say. Travelling light _does_ have its advantages.  
  
I watched from above as the ground around her corpse soaked up the liquid just as eagerly as her clothes and hair did, before flicking the lighter on and tossing it in.  
  
There is something so very satisfying about the cackle of a fire, the sight and scent of a human body being destroyed by it. I suppose it’s that there’s something so very final about it.   
  
Plus, it certainly does make cleanup a breeze. No messy body parts to stow away, just a pile of ash, and with the dirt pushed back into the grave on top of it, likely to never see the light of day again.  
  
 _No muss, no fuss._  
  
Just the way I like it.  
  
See, I may be a monster...but at least I’m a neat one.  
  
It’s the only way I’ve made it this far, on my own.  
  
But it certainly wasn’t always the case. No, my first kill wasn’t anywhere near as neat and tidy. I don’t mind though. Everyone needs a good learning experience.

  


_“You’re different...aren’t you, Sam?” Jessica whispers it, but somehow it feels much closer to a scream._  
  
 _I push away from her, flatten myself against the door—the farthest that the small confines of the car will allow me to get from her. Still, her eyes hold me, nothing but big sky blue depths of accusation for me to drown in, for me to choke on._  
  
 _It makes the memory of those same words, spoken what seems like a lifetime ago, flash in front of me._  
  
 _Jessica isn’t there anymore, and suddenly it’s my Mother that’s sitting in front of me. Her figure appears so real—like if I reached out I really would be able to feel her, warm and there, underneath my fingers. She’s got her hands neatly folded in her lap, and Father right behind, propping her up and holding her together with the curl of his hand around her shoulder._  
  
 _I can feel the fear choke me all over again. Time catches and drags, stretches out this moment that started out with the both of them looking everywhere but me, until their eyes had sought out nothing else **but** me. _  
  
You’re different, _they’d said._  
  
You’re our good deed, but you’re not ours, _they hadn’t said._  
  
 _No. They were nicer than that, of course. So they had gone on to provide me with a much too well-practiced explanation of how they’d taken me in when I was no more than six months old; how they’d raised me as their own._  
  
 _Even though I wasn’t._  
  
 _They sat there watching me. I had felt so lost and trapped—because yes, I_ was _different. That was certainly part of it. But mostly because they were so obviously waiting for something—scared to look and scared not to look, and I couldn’t be sure if they were afraid that I would fall apart...or if they were afraid that I **wouldn’t**._  
  
You’re different.  
  
 _The words echoed around me, inside me, swelling, growing._  
  
You’re different.  
  
You’re different.  
  
You’re different.  
  
 _Oh, but the words were only too true._  
  
 _If only they’d known just how very different._  
  
 _I was no fool, though. I might’ve not known many things back then, but I knew instinctively that I couldn’t share with anyone exactly how different I really was—especially not mommy and daddy dearest—that doing so would surely be as good as signing my own death warrant._  
  
 _This...this had been the point in my life when I’d realized that I was all alone. Not in an abstract teenage melodramatic crisis kind of way...but in the most clear, mundane sense of the term: there was no one I could safely share this with. I could never allow anyone to see just how different I really was. This burden would be mine and mine alone._  
  
 _As I sat there, trying to breathe through the painful truth of that, I nodded at them and bared my teeth in my best attempt at a reassuring smile, held taut and stiff until I heard the soft click of the door behind them._  
  
 _After, I’d avoided their eyes as much they’d avoided mine. Because I really couldn’t bear to see exactly how much of the truth—how much of **my** truth—they had actually been able to see.  _  
  
_But now, sitting in the car on secluded road with what was closest to a girlfriend I had ever come to, everything was closing in around me. Because much as I may have wanted to, I could not ignore the fact that those blue eyes of hers were filled with the knowledge of my truth. And if she knows, if she sees....what then?_  
  
 _She seems to somehow catch the exact moment when my focus returns to her, and simply curves her lips in the tiniest of smiles. As if she’s been waiting on me, almost like she doesn’t even mind—just is glad I’m back._  
  
 _She blinks, once, twice._  
  
 _“Sam,” she whispers, and then she’s pushing closer, flattening her palm over the rapid beating of my heart. “It’s okay.”_  
  
 _She looks up at me, her gaze as reassuring as it is pleading._  
  
 _After a moment, a small self-deprecating smile twists at the corner of her mouth. “That you’re different, I mean. It’s okay.”_  
  
 _Her gaze drops away, and when she looks back up there’s something else there in her eyes—something that shines brightly and darkly at once._  
  
 _“Really, Sam. I like it.”_  
  
 _So I let myself be convinced._  
  
 _After all, she feels so good, and smells so good, and ohdeargod, she tastes **too** good. Before I know it I’m wrapped around her as much as she is around me. Maybe she _ could _be okay with this...maybe even_ this _could all be okay now._  
  
 _I have myself so convinced by the time I’m buried inside of her, but then it all comes apart. Because she really does smell and taste too damn good. And I need more, so much more. When my teeth scrape at the first taste of blood it’s already too late._  
  
 _For her._  
  
 _And for me._  
  
 _The delicate skin of her neck breaking underneath my teeth, the ineffectual pounding of her tiny fists against my chest, the kicking of her legs somewhere further down, even her screams—none of it really registers, they all seem to be happening somewhere that is not here. Some other car, some other world. She just tastes way too fucking good, and I can’t get enough, until I can’t get anything and I lift my head to try to see how this is possible, what is happening...and that’s when I see what I’ve done._  
  
 _She’s lying there like a broken Barbie doll, blonde hair splayed out underneath her, limbs bent and twisted at angles that seem to defy human bone and muscle structure, blue eyes frozen, wide and unblinking, staring but unseeing. For a second, I want to believe it’s not what it appears to be. Then my eyes catch on the mangled mess of blood and skin and softer things that used to be a neck...until some wild beast tore it apart._  
  
 _Me._  
  
 _It was me._  
  
 _In fact, I can’t remember ever being—feeling—_ more _me._  
  
 _That’s when I panic._  
  
 _I’m crawling out of the car, I just...just need to get away. But I stop, right there on my knees with no more than a few feet separating me from what I’ve done, the wetness from the ground seeping into my skin and my eyes helplessly locked on the bloody wreck in front of me._  
  
 _How is it even possible for me to really truly get away from this? From the real me that’s always been inside, just waiting to claw its way out?  And won’t I always just end up right here again, anyways? Right back in this moment time after time?_  
  
 _No, Stop._  
  
 _Think._  
  
 _Think. Think. Think._  
  
 _I can’t go to anyone for help. That much is obvious. Because they’ll just see me for who—for_ what _—I really am. A freak. A whole new level of freak. No, that doesn’t even cover it. I’m a monster, that thing that you hope and pray doesn’t really exist, isn’t hiding in the dark._  
  
 _Hiding. It’s the only thing I_ can _do now._  
  
 _I can run, and as the words form inside my head they begin to convince me of their truth—of their brilliance—all on their own._  
  
 _Because now is actually the perfect time to run. With the semester just a couple of weeks in, I wouldn’t be expected back home for at least a few more months...plenty of time to disappear. The beauty of it all, the way everything suddenly fits together so perfectly...it’s calming. It settles coolly along my spine, sinks smoothly and seductively into my skin, rushes through my blood and races down deep._  
  
 _It lights my way, makes everything clear._  
  
 _I can do this._  
  
 _I have to do this._  
  
 _There was never really any choice._  
  
 _The fire catches so much easier than I thought it would, so much faster than I could have ever hoped it would._  
  
 _Still, I stay and watch it, can’t resist the sight of the flames’ red glow turning the car and everything inside it to black nothingness. I turn away, but not until I can’t recognize what it was that I was looking at just a few short moments ago._  
  
 _I draw comfort in that, in the safety that it promises me._

  


I had indeed learned so very much since that night.  
  
Trial by fire, as it were.  
  
I can still remember in those first few days, weeks, even months, that followed...how  I’d wished there’d been some sort of manual,something that would tell me exactly what to do, and howto do it; a step-by-step guide, complete with diagrams. Somewhere I could go to when I was lost, had no idea where to turn—a place to go to where the answer would be spelled out on a page. Simple, clear. Black and white.  
  
But no, everything I’ve learned, I’ve had to teach myself.  
  
And I’ve taught myself well. More than enough...and certainly more than most.  
  
But still, there are some things I’ll never know.  
  
For one, I don’t think I’ll ever find my real family—the ones that brought me into this world, the ones whose blood runs through my veins. Though it certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying, I assure you.  
  
For starters, my adoptive parents never did give me much to go on...though I suspect it was because they probably never knew all that much to begin with. Since I walked away that night—from them, from my life, from everything that I’d known myself to be up until that very point—well, I haven’t had any more luck on my own. On that front, anyways. I guess some things aren’t meant to be known...no matter how much we may wish otherwise.  
  
Yet, it leaves me in the dark, with no clue as to whether I was born this way...or if something happened along the way to make me, _shape me_ , into what I am.  
  
Perhaps I will never know what made this dark, empty hole inside of me. All I do know is that with every passing day it only seems to grow ever deeper, more needy, more insatiable, more demanding.  
  
I do certainly know how to fill it. Temporarily, anyways.  
  
And right now? Well, right now I was as full and happy as can be.  
  
Me _and_ the monster riding shotgun inside me.

**::**

  


When I stepped into the elevator at Sandover Bridge & Iron Inc a few short hours later, I wore no clue that could give away what I’d done—what I _was_ —just a little while ago. Now, here, I was just another spoke on that ever-spinning wheel, just another worker bee heading up to waste away the next eight or so mindless hours in that square little prison. Or as they liked to call it, a _‘cubicle’_.  
  
Perception _is_ everything.  
  
And I was a master at it. Kind of had to be, I guess.  
  
Still, I had to remind myself sometimes what it was that these people _did_ see when they looked at me. So trustingly...like I really _was_ just one of them.  
  
It was on morning-after’s like these that I had to stop myself from examining my hands too closely—just to make sure that there really were no traces of blood left behind, underneath the fingernails or in between the creases of the knuckles; had to resist the urge to sniff the air around me—just to be completely certain that the scent of charred flesh and bone had not managed somehow to cling to me, despite all the scouring that left my skin pink and tender.  
  
On such days I had to tell myself that even though the blood felt like it was virtually _singing_ through my veins, that the happy glow that it simply _had_ to be giving my face most likely only played up my freshly-scrubbed boy-next-door persona. Tucked so neatly as I was into the company-issued polo shirt in bright-as-can-be sunshine yellow with a blazing grin to more than match it, well...it was pretty obvious that what these poor, clueless souls—my _co-workers_ —saw when they looked at me was just that: Sam Wesson, IT associate. Punctual, eager to please, and harmless as can be.  
  
 _Nothing more._  
  
Maybe it was that I wore this mask of normalcy so well. Practice _does_ make perfect, as the saying goes. And I _had_ been practicing for most of my life.  
  
Or maybe it was that they didn’t really _want_ to see past all that. Who knows?  
  
Either way, it worked.  
  
I just had to keep reminding myself of that. Every so often.  
  
Still, it was hard not to marvel sometimes at just how easy it was to blend in, to disappear among the great mindless mass of them all. To fixate on the why’s and how’s of that.  
  
Other times, I would catch myself almost having to remind myself—like the far-away voice of some other me calling out, trying to jolt me awake from a dream—that I wasn’t really one of them, that I wasn’t who (not to mention _what_ ) they so easily accepted me to be.

  


**::**

  


The day went by uneventfully. Smooth and quick and easy.   
  
Guess that should’ve been my first clue that something really bad was about to happen.  
  
 _Epically bad._  
  
It didn’t happen though, until I passed the day in complete oblivion of the impending doom that awaited me. No. It wasn’t until the elevator ride home at the end of those eight hours of blissful cluelessness. And even then, I was completely unaware…that is, until the doors slid open a couple of floors down.  
  
When he first walked in, head bowed down and eyes fixed on his phone without so much as sparing a glance as to what his feet were doing—well, he looked harmless enough, same as any other stuffy suit with their head stuck up their own ass. From what I’d observed at Sandover thus far, it _did_ seem to be some sort of job requirement. For those in the executive upper echelons, anyways.  
  
But then…then I made the mistake of actually looking. I don’t even know what it was that drew my eyes to him, even less what kept them practically glued there.  
  
The hard angle of his jaw line, the graceful muscled slope of his shoulders, those large strong hands that looked so very capable (of so many, many things) even the inviting bow of his legs…these were all highly pleasing to the eyes, surely. Certain to draw many admiring eyes. But no, that wasn’t it. At least not all of it.  
  
No. Beyond all of that, there was something else. Something… _familiar_.  
  
I couldn’t even say what it was for certain. But it was definitely something more than the sum of all his parts, beautiful though they might have been. Maybe it was something in the way that he held himself—so controlled, so tightly wound upon itself, yet at the same time, like he could spring at any second…..  
  
There was just… _something_.  
  
Something so—  
  
He looked up, and I had to stop myself from stumbling back. It was like a punch to the gut, his gaze. And suddenly it seemed like there was no more air available…or maybe that my lungs had forgotten how to do their job.  
  
Logically, I knew that the only reason he was even looking at me right now, with a raised eyebrow that was just as much a threat as it was a question…well, I understood intellectually that it was most likely only the result of the way that I had been staring at him, from pretty much the moment that he’d walked into the elevator.  
  
Still, that stellar bit of logic-based knowledge did nothing to stop the feeling that this man was looking right back at me. More than that, the he could see me— _right through me_.  
  
What’s worse, was the way it made my heart pound in my chest, so loud I was sure he must be able to hear it too. Or, I suppose I should be more exact, and say that what was the worst was _the_ _reason_ for its erratic thump-thumping. It was just as much out of excitement as it was out of fear. And that? Excitement that I might very well be caught, seen for the monster that I truly was? Well, that was downright suicidal.  
  
Ignoring the dueling desires within me to both back up as far away as the enclosed space would allow _and_ to do the exact opposite and step right into his space, I smoothed out my face and offered him my brightest smile.  
  
But he only stared back harder.  
  
I wondered if maybe I’d overshot that smile, that it was perhaps a bit more blinding than even the most eager politeness could pass for, even as I hastily pulled it back a notch. _Or ten._  
  
Sometimes the line between perfect and too much was so very hard to make out.  
  
The judgmental tilt of his head right before he slid his eyes back down to his phone left me in serious doubt as to my success on that front, and with my vision blacking out around the edges.  
  
Even knowing I shouldn’t, knowing it was the worst thing for me to possibly do at this point—I simply couldn’t command my eyes to move away from him.  
  
For his part, he seemed to be content to ignore me and to focus all of his attention on the email that he seemed to be somewhat violently scrolling through at the moment.  
  
Again, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from doing what I knew to be completely lacking in all common sense—it was like my brain had stopped working enough to control my mouth, but not enough so as to ease my suffering with the blissful darkness of unconsciousness.   
  
No. Just stop it, right now. Don’t do it. _But_ _I have to._  
  
“Do—do I know you?”  
  
Do _you_ know _me_?  
  
His head snapped up and his eyes danced over me—and right fucking through me. _Again._  
  
How was it even possible to feel like all your breath was stolen out of you at the same time as feeling like some weight was lifted so that you could actually finally breathe free and unrestricted? Like…like that first glorious intake of oxygen after you’ve been submerged underwater and holding your breath.    
  
“I don’t think so,” he finally replied, returning to his email once more.  
  
But there was _something_ about that look.  
  
Some ridiculous and unexplainable thing that was wrong and right and dug into me and. Would. Not. Let. Go.  
  
How it was equally amused as it was suspicious; defensive and ready to pounce all at once.  
  
There was just _something_ in the way that it moved over me.  
  
Something more than just the way it made my heart squeeze and stutter before sprinting way too fast.  
  
It was all somehow just so incredibly familiar, that try as I might, I could no more look away and ignore it than keep my damn mouth shut. And so once again, the words tumbled right out. It was like the lips and tongue that shaped them weren’t even my own. Even though there really was no denying that the words were all mine, more truth in them than perhaps any other words I had uttered out loud since…since ever.  
  
“Sorry, man. You just look _really_ familiar.”  
  
This just _feels_ really familiar.  
  
He looked up again, pinning me in place with those eyes of his.  
  
 _I see you_ , those eyes said. As did the twitch at the corner of his mouth.  
  
When he turned away a moment later, it was hard not to catch the smirk—as much on his face as in his voice.  
  
“Save it for the health club, pal.”  
  
Before I could so much as open my mouth for a reply, the elevator doors slid open with a too-loud ding. As I watched him walk away, I wanted so very much to knock that arrogant, entirely too damn satisfied smirk right off those pretty little lips of his.   
  
But I knew that I couldn’t, just as clearly as I knew that the best thing for me to do for myself right now would be to let him get as far away as possible from me.  
  
Yes. The more distance between the two of us, the better.  
  
So why the hell did it seem that much harder to breathe now that he was gone?


	3. Chapter 3

There are no secrets in life, just hidden truths that lie beneath the surface.  _And they simply lie there, biding their time, just waiting for that most (un)perfect moment to break through to the surface._

 

 

_The girl thrashes around in the chair and blinks her big, wide, doll eyes up at me. One moment they are chestnut brown, and all sweet innocence and pleading, and in the next blink they are nothing but flat, thick blackness._

_I look away from the sweet smile she has aimed at me, look down to the book that is held tight in my hands. My eyes get stuck to the sight of my own knuckles gone white around the edges of the book with the violence of my grip, so much so that it takes me a good long moment to realize that my lips are moving, that I’m reciting the words on the page, and that for some reason the foreign words don’t taste so foreign on my tongue. At least not as much as they should._

_I focus on the words, on how steady and sure they come spilling out of my own mouth._

_But then she laughs. And the sound is full of delight—of sheer glee—that it distracts me, makes my head snap up._

_She must see something even funnier in my face. Though what it possibly could be, I couldn’t even begin to guess at._

_“Oh, honey. You actually thought that’d work? On **me**?”_

_Her head drops back, revealing the long column of her neck as her laughter bubbles up and takes up all the space between us._

_But then a man appears behind her, gliding smoothly and almost imperceptibly out of the shadows. One moment there’s nothing there, and then the next he's poised above her, his hand flying out to her throat and slashing right across it. Her laughter is abruptly silenced, and all that remains behind is the wet gurgling of her last breaths as she chokes them out through the massive gash in her throat._

_Yet strangely, there is not a whole lot of blood. Instead, it oozes, slow and thick. And inside, underneath the skin, her insides crackle and pop, more like she’s been electrocuted than stabbed._

_“Nah. But **that**  should do the trick.”_

_The man’s voice is low and rough and oh so very fucking dark, breathing the words right by her open mouth as it struggles uselessly for a few last gulps of air._

_“That’s right. Time to go back home, devil spawn.” he murmurs, voice soaked with glee, as her body gives one last violent jerk._  
  
 _He straightens up and wipes the blade against his pants, giving me a wink before his face splits into a giant grin._  
  
  
  
And of course,  _of fucking course_ , that’s when it all slips away with an enormous blinding throb of my head that smacks me right back to reality.  
  
My desk and its encompassing cubicle were just coming back into focus around me when the voice shrieking indignantly into my ear piece finally managed to pierce through my haze.  
  
“Sir?  _Sirrrrrr?_ Are you still there?” the voice screeched against the inner walls of my brain.  
  
“Yes, ma’am.”  
  
I hurried to reassure her.  
  
I could distantly remember telling her to try shutting her computer on and off, and that I would stay on the line with her while we both waited for it to reboot—I must’ve drifted off somehow, while we’d been waiting on it.  
  
“Well?”  
  
She huffed out.  
  
 _Huh._   _That’d be_   _my question exactly._  
  
I resisted the urge to share  _that_  with her though, instead focusing all my energy on keeping the eye roll out of my voice.  
  
“Tell me what you see now.”  
  
Her put-upon sigh crackled and hissed into my headpiece.  
  
“It says, ‘Updates are available for your computer. Click here to install.’”  
  
“Well there ya go.” I replied extra cheerily, quickly tacking on a belated and suitably polite, “Ma’am.”  
  
“There I—” she spluttered. “I’m sorry,  _what?!_ ”  
  
“Just go ahead and install those updates, and you should be good to go!”  
  
After a long pause, there was a muted “ _oh_ ”, followed soon thereafter by the click of the phone being hung up. None too gently, either.  
  
“You’re welcome,” I grumbled to no one in particular, turning to my computer screen to finish filling out the support ticket.  
  
But as soon as I finished the form, and no longer had the distraction of work to keep my eyes and mind otherwise occupied, I could no longer ignore the truth that was staring me right in the damn face; that was close.  
  
 _Way too fucking close._  
  
I wasn’t sure what had prompted the vision, but the fact that I had slipped away into semi-consciousness right in the middle of a call, while another person was on the line, no less, with no control over higher brain function or any of the words that may have slipped out while I was completely unaware of anything or anyone else around—well. That was entirely too dangerous.  
  
I  _did_  seem to have lucked out this time, but to lose control of myself in such a manner, and in such a public place...it left me vulnerable, exposed. Helpless.  
  
Among a whole long list of other quite unpalatable things, to say the least. None of which I had felt in a very, very long time.  
  
Things I’d spent my entire life guarding against, building that protective wall around myself, brick by carefully laid brick, in order to shield myself from the danger they posed. Only now, it would seem that that wall had somehow crumbled all around me, leaving me to stare at the wreckage, wondering how it was even possible for it to have all happened within the span of no more than the blink of an eye.  
  
While I did not have a clue as to why or how I’d arrived here, what  _was_  oh so very clear was the fact that it was not— _could_  not be—acceptable.  
  
I had to stop this, and I had to do it now.  
  
Yesterday, in fact.  
  
There were several other things of which I was certain, though the knowledge did not bring me much comfort. Far from it, they in fact produced the opposite effect in me, each one more damaging to that crumbling wall than then next.  
  
Foremost of which was that that man who had appeared in my dream— _who had appeared in so many of my dreams_ —well, he’d been a faceless shadow up until today. But now, now that I spotted those familiar army-green eyes, that too-pretty little mouth...oh, now I knew exactly who he was.  
  
What I did  _not_  know, however, was why exactly Mr. Hot Elevator Ass was there. Or even  _how_ he was there _—_ several years before I’d ever even occupied the same physical space as him.  
  
But even worse, was the fact that I was having these dreams at all.  _Right now._  
  
I had just killed, just fed my dark friend. The blood that was not mine still coursing hot and heavy in my veins, still wrapping and twisting itself around my own, the ghost of its taste still clinging to my skin, inside and out.  
  
This should not be happening. Not. Now.  
  
I should not be having any of my strange dreams for a while now, certainly not barely even two days later.  
  
I was never too clear on the mechanics of it all, but satisfying my dark passenger had always seemed to be tied somehow to those visions. Or rather, their lack thereof. I had in fact come to rely on the unquestionable fact that a satiated  passenger translated into the blissful darkness of a dreamless sleep. No crazy dreams to haunt my nighttime or my daytime hours.  
  
At least until the next time he needed to be fed.  
  
Which meant that for some reason, he was not satisfied.  
  
 _He needed more._  
  
I had no idea how this could be so. In the end though, I suppose it didn't really matter. I knew how to fix it, how to satisfy  _him_.  
  
And that was exactly what I planned on doing.  
  
Just as soon as that 5 o’clock bell tolled.   
  
And it couldn’t come soon enough, I thought as I let my head fall to my desk while I waited for my next call to come in.

 

  


**::**

  


I’d barely closed my eyes when my chair jerked forward with a hard bump from behind, throwing my body painfully against the desk.  
  
My head shot up automatically, eyes fixed straight ahead and staring at nothing in particular as I let out a groan. I did not need to look behind me to know exactly who I’d see there.  
  
“Hey, bro!”  
  
And right on cue, the manic enthusiasm of that voice confirmed what I already knew.  
  
“Jimmy,” I gritted out through clenched teeth, still staring unseeingly at my computer screen so I wouldn’t have to take in the way his smile spread just a little bit too wide, showed entirely too many teeth.  
  
Jimmy Novak smiled like he was  _doing_  a smile, rather than just smiling— and never quite managed to fully forget it. The result wasn’t strained or unnatural or anything—nothing quite that obvious. It was just a bit too big...and it wasn’t helped any by the way it made his eyes bulge out, showing too much of the whites.  
  
Now don’t get me wrong, I did love the guy (well, as much as you  _could_  love a nice enough if overly eager co-worker). But his slightly-off awkwardness, mixed with the way he tried too hard to hide it…it was just a little much to stomach, especially this early in the day.  
  
 _Especially with the way **this**  particular day had been going so far. _  
  
I was hoping he’d have gotten the hint from the impenetrable set of my shoulders. However, when I still felt his stare burning a hole through my back a few minutes later, I had to reconcile myself to the fact that I might have overestimated him.  
  
 _Or maybe underestimated him._  
  
Letting out a resigned sigh, I looked back over my shoulder at him with an arched brow. He merely smiled at me in return, bright as the fucking sun. If the sun had just gone supernova, that is.  
  
I tried to still the violent clenching of my jaw muscles, and fixed him with a thin, cool smile.  
  
“Something I can get you, man?”  
  
His own smile shrunk back at the corners at that, before he tilted his head to the side in what looked like a rather dangerous angle. He studied me intently.  
  
“Nawww, man. Nawww,” he returned as he sagged back into his chair, waving his hand in the air dismissively. “This is more about what  _I_  can get  _you_.”  
  
I stared at him dumbly.  
  
And then his smile returned full force. He smacked my arm, before rolling his chair back so that he’d have just enough room to stand over me and still be within maximal looming distance. Or rather, lack of distance.  
  
“C’mon, man. By the looks of you, you need a coffee break more than I do.”  
  
He did his menacing glare thing—where he looked like he was just daring me to challenge him, but also at the same time like his eyes might very well pierce through my skin, laser beam style—before his face seemed to relax its way out of it. His smile tipped sideways, well on its way into pedophile leer territory, as he pressed the palm of his hand flat against his chest gallantly.  
  
“And  _I_ , being the awesome friend that I am, will not only keep you company, but will also join you in partaking of your substance dependency of choice.”  
  
I snorted.  
  
“This is not a joking matter, Sam Wesson.” He informed me in his haughtiest voice, putting his super serious face on. “Friends do not let friends drink alone, man.”  
  
And I had to laugh at that. Because if only he knew about my real drinking habits.  
  
“You’re such a dork.” I hurriedly added at his mock-incensed look, rising to my feet and shaking my head sadly.  
  
He looked back over at me as we started making our way toward the break room.  
  
“It takes one to love one?”  
  
I snorted again, and quickened my step.

  


**::**

  


My eyes were still intently focused on the color of the coffee, letting the creamer swirl its way into the muddy liquid until it hit just the right shade of almost-white, when the words I’d been dreading as equally as I had been expecting them finally descended on me.  
  
“So. You gonna tell me what it was about this time?”  
  
Well, about damn time. Honestly I wasn’t sure what had taken this long, anyways.  
  
I forced out a long exhale as I set the creamer down on the counter just a bit too roughly. I busied myself with screwing the lid back on it, slowly and carefully and really, if I was honest, just stretching out the task as long as possible.  
  
“Like I’d tell you,” I muttered under my breath, as I turned around to put the creamer back into the fridge.  
  
“Aww,” he whined. “Come on, man!”  
  
I cocked an eyebrow at him as I leaned back on the counter and sipped my coffee.  
  
“Okay, okay. I promise not to laugh,” he said, his smirk giving him away all too easily.  
  
“Okay well...not too much, anyways. Besides. You know you’ll feel better after you let it out. You know, get it off your chest.”  
  
I gave him an unconvinced grunt.  
  
“What? You know it’s true,  _broski_!”  
  
I rolled my eyes. Jimmy had this habit of picking up and then proceeding to horribly abuse words that he’d somehow discovered were supposed to be the latest and greatest. I didn’t know his sources—and I liked keeping it that way. But it seemed like no matter how many times he’d say his latest word of the day (or more often  _month_ , unfortunately), it would still end up sounding somehow off on his tongue, like he was trying to swear in a different language, or something.  
  
Most such words would start off as being vaguely amusing. Invariably, they turned towards irritating within a few weeks. ‘ _Bro’_  had definitely reached the latter part of its lifecycle, even more so with the added bonus of its seemingly infinite number of mutations.  
  
“Dude, come on,” he pleaded, soft and earnest. “You know  _I_  can’t do the caring, unless  _you_  pony up first with the sharing.”  
  
 _Pony up_ …I groaned, digging the heel of my hand into my forehead.  
  
“Fine, fine.”  
  
I stuck as much of my face as would fit into my mug and took several fortifying gulps of the coffee, doing my best  _not_  to look at the way Jimmy’s face bore far too much resemblance to that of a kid settling in to listen to a grand old tale by the campfire, as he sat down at the table and patted the seat next to him in invitation.  
  
I knew that Jimmy was trustworthy, that whatever I said would never leave this room—about as much as I knew that the only thing that would make the dreams go away was if I slicked their departure with plenty of fresh blood. I was beyond a hundred percent certain of both, mostly from the undisputable evidence that can only be gained through past experience.  
  
I had already told Jimmy about my dreams several times before, and no real harm had come of it—aside from some odd looks (even by Jimmy standards), and the ego bruises that can only come from suspecting you weren’t really much more than a form of cheap entertainment. Aside from that, even if Jimmy were to take my wild and crazy stories as anything  _other_  than dreams, and actually tell someone...who the hell would ever believe him?  
  
But most of all, I knew that my self-medicating practices notwithstanding, they wouldn’t be enough to solve the whole problem. Not this time. Because making the dreams go away was one thing, not thinking about the dreams I’d already had? And, more to the point perhaps, that certain someone who had suddenly snatched up the starring role? Well, that was another thing entirely.  
  
And maybe Jimmy  _was_  right, maybe saying the words out loud could help—it certainly couldn’t hurt to give it a shot.  
  
The only problem was…where to even start?  
  
“So what’d you kill this time,  _brohemoth_?”  
  
Letting out a deep sigh, my eyes reluctantly lifted to meet Jimmy’s.  
  
“It actually wasn’t me that did the killing,” I muttered.  
  
Before I could change my mind, I quickly tacked on, the words so rapid they blurred together around the edges.  
  
“It was just a demon, I think.”  
  
Jimmy’s eyes looked like they were in actual legitimate danger of popping right out of his head, before something seemed to shift behind them and he threw back his head and roared with laughter.  
  
“ _Just a demon._  Oh man,” he wiped at the corners of his eyes. “You kill me,  _brotato_.”  
  
I pressed my lips together, to the point that they almost went numb, and turned back to my coffee. Jimmy was silent for a few minutes, except for the occasional  _hmmm_  thinking sound.  
  
“So, what uh—” he swallowed hard. “What exactly makes you think it was a demon?”  
  
My eyes snapped up to his.  
  
He let out a nervous laugh, waving his hand awkwardly in the air.  
  
“I mean, what? Did the thing have horns? A red jumpsuit? What?”  
  
I snorted and shook my head.  
  
“Well, no. But I was reciting this thing in Latin…I was reading it from some old dusty manuscript type book, or something.”  
  
Now  _that_  got a raised eyebrow.  
  
“And then there were all these strange symbols drawn around her. Uh,  _it_. Like, some serious Satanist occult type shit, y’know?”  
  
He gave a weak nod, like his mind had suddenly gone somewhere far, far away.  
  
I chose to ignore the strange behavior, because right now proving that my demon statement wasn’t completely ridiculous and insane seemed a lot more important.  
  
“And y’know...when I was reciting the incantation, or whatever it was, there  _was_  all that smoke that came out of her?”  
  
“Smoke?” he gasped the word out.  
  
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Like...this black smoke. Y’know, kinda like those things in that Ghost movie that dragged all the bad guys away?”  
  
I laughed softly, then shook it off with a shrug.  
  
“Oh. And then there  _was_  also how the man that killed her called her devil spawn.”  
  
Jimmy’s mouth went tight around the edges.  
  
“Yes, but devil spawn refers to a child conceived between a human and a demon; demons aren’t—”  
  
He stopped himself, eyes looking truly horrified before skittering away. I cocked my head at him, studying his face.  
  
“Something you wanna tell me there, Jimmy?”  
  
“What? No,” he bristled, before shrugging it off with a self-deprecating huff of a laugh. “I just…you know me. I watch way too many of those horror flicks,  _broham_.”  
  
He smiled at me then, the type of smile that made it seem like  _I_  was the one being weird or ridiculous here. I was too engrossed in trying to figure out what that was all about, when Jimmy had asked me the question the first time.  
  
“Dude? Dude! You still with me there?”  
  
“What?”  
  
I shook my head to clear it.  
  
He watched me steadily for a long moment before repeating his earlier question.  
  
“I said, was the guy someone you know?”  
  
I stared at him blankly.  
  
“You know, the guy that killed her? Er... _It?_ ”  
  
“Oh. Oh, yeah,” I slumped back against the counter with a pained sigh. “Yeah, I  _do_  know him. Well, sorta. Not really, though.”  
  
He tipped his head back, mouth turning up at the corner with amusement.  
  
“How exactly does one go about ‘sorta, not really’ knowing a person?”  
  
I snorted, running a hand through my hair.  
  
“I. Well. I don’t  _know him_  know him. Just…” I huffed out a frustrated sigh. “I ran into this guy on the elevator yesterday, okay? He was just this stuffy, high level executive type, with his tie done up too tight to even have the ability to make some polite small talk. Without being a complete ass.”  
  
Jimmy quirked his eyebrow.  
  
I made a dismissing motion in the air between us.  
  
“Whatever. Point is, that I recognized his face...but I don’t know who he is  _per se_.”  
  
“Hmm,” Jimmy nodded, regarding me critically. “So what you’re telling me here is, that you shared a…what? All of a five minute elevator ride with this guy yesterday, and then he suddenly starts showing up in your dreams?”  
  
“Well…” I swallowed thickly at the stunned, disbelieving look on Jimmy’s face. “Well...I mean, now that I recognized him…I think. No. Yeah. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s been in my dreams for a while now, I just didn’t know that it was him.”  
  
Jimmy blinked at me rapidly, mouth opening and closing several times.  
  
“Do-do you know what his name is?” he asked in a strained whisper.  
  
“I. No.” I dragged out the last syllable with an unsteady hesitation.  
  
He seemed to think it over for a few minutes.  
  
“Do you think you’d be able to describe him?”  
  
“What the hell for?” I demanded.  
  
“So we can figure out who it is,” he replied calmly, slowly, as if it was the most obvious thing ever. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. The employee files—including picture IDs— should be easy enough to access…for any self respecting member of the IT department, that is.”  
  
“Yeah, but still. What the hell  _for_ , Jimmy?”  
  
He sighed heavily, before lifting his coffee to his lips.  
  
“Well I, for one, am curious about exactly who this dude is that’s somehow managed to get into your dreams,” he muttered into the cup. “And hey, they’re not even  _my_  dreams, bromeister.”  
  
I wasn’t even sure what was creepier—the entire sentence, or the fact that he refused to look anywhere near me when he said it. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to reach any sort of definitive conclusion on that one.  
  
I was, however, pretty damn sure that Jimmy was right.  
  
I might not like having the guy haunt my unconscious hours, sure. But regardless of how much I wanted to stop seeing him every time I closed my eyes, until I could make  _that_  happen, finding out as much as I could about him was most likely the smartest course of action.  
  
Always be prepared.  
  
It was the only thing that I could say (with a straight face, that is) that I had in common with the boy scouts of America—and I planned on keeping it that way.


	4. Chapter 4

_ None of us are who we appear to be on the outside. But we must maintain appearances to survive. Some of us do it so well, for so long, that we’ve forgotten what it’s like not to hide.  
_

 

_  
_

I cursed to myself when I got on the crowded elevator a few hours later, only to discover Mr. Hot Elevator Ass himself—Mr. Dean Smith, that is—was on there, too.  
  
Finding his name had been easy, just as Jimmy had predicted. Unfortunately, it didn’t provide any more in the way of answers...other than a few cursory bio stats and a perfectly spotless job history, that is.  
  
Now, all I could do was curse even more when everyone  _but_  Mr. Smith got off and I found myself once again alone in an elevator with this guy...and with entirely too many floors left to go before we hit our destination: Parking Level #5.  
  
Judging by the hard set of his jaw, as well as the white-knuckle grip he had on his phone, he was probably having a rather similar internal dialogue.  
  
The air supply seemed to only grow smaller now that we had the elevator to ourselves, the tension getting thicker and more constricting with every breath—as if it were actually its own physical entity. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly while I watched him carefully.  
  
“Hey, could I uh,” I cleared my throat, vocal chords constricting at the way he seemed to wince in reaction to my voice. “Could I ask you a question?”  
  
He froze. When he finally did look up, his eyes darted back and forth frantically, as if there might actually be some sort of emergency exit around here somewhere. As if he might be able to find a way out of this if he just looked hard enough. Finally though, his eyes slid over to mine with an irritated groan.  
  
“Hey man, I thought we already went through this…”  
  
I quirked a brow at the flailing motioning of his phone between us.  
  
He sighed.  
  
“You know…when I told you that I don’t go to the  _‘gym’_?”  
  
I couldn’t decide if I was amused or annoyed that he actually felt the need to make the physical air quotes, as if the way he spit out the word hadn’t quite spelled it out adequately.  
  
I snorted, and let my eyes trail up and down his body, lingering at the widest part of the bow of his legs before looking up with a cocky smirk.  
  
“Mmm. I dunno man. You kinda look like you do.  _And often._ ”  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
He stepped forward, face and tone rapidly getting heated.  
  
I tossed him a placating smile, before looking away with a shrug.  
  
“Oh, nuthin’. But that’s-that’s not what I was gonna…” I broke off, huffing in frustration before giving it another go as I returned my gaze to his once more. “Seriously though.  _Can_  I ask you a question? Just one. I promise, man.”  
  
He let out an exaggerated pained sigh, but then motioned with his hand for me to go on.  
  
“Yeah, okay. Fine.”  
  
“What uh.” I gulped in as much air as my lungs would hold. I saw no way this could end well. “What do you think of…demons?”  
  
“Of…?” He spluttered, eyes going wide and brows shooting up alarmingly close to his hairline—that impeccably groomed not-one-hair-out-of-place hair of his—and then shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “I’m sorry…what?!”  
  
I stared back at him silently, pressing my lips into a thin line while I waited for him to answer the question.  
  
“I…wait. Seriously?”  
  
I nodded.  
  
“I don’t!” He snapped back with a forced laugh. He looked down as his hand twitched, holding himself like he was holding a nervous tick in check. “Uh. Think about them, that is.”  
  
I ground my teeth.  
  
“C’mon, man. I’m being serious here.”  
  
His eyes snapped back to mine.  
  
“So am I!”  
  
I gave a faint nod, and let the silence descend upon us once again as I considered that.  
  
“So…” I slanted a look at him. “‘S that mean you don’t believe in the Devil either, then?”  
  
He inclined his head, eyes boring into me. But then he threw back his head and laughed. He was laughing so hard that his shoulders were literally shaking, and he had to grab onto the railing for support. He certainly didn’t seem to be forcing it this time.  
  
At last, he sobered up some—enough to form words, anyways.  
  
“I’m sorry, man, but… really?  _That’s_  how you’re gonna play it? Does that…does that ever even work for you?”  
  
“I’m not—”  
  
He put up his hand to stop me.  
  
“Oh no, no. Hang on. Let me guess. This would be where you ask me if I’ve been saved…right?”  
  
“What? No! No, I just—”  
  
“Look, man. I don’t know what sorta game you’re playin’ here,” he cut me off. “But honestly? Don’t really care.”  
  
He eyed me hard for a moment, before stepping into my space aggressively and continuing his little tirade.  
  
“Okay, best case scenario? This is all just some weird-ass attempt at a pickup line. And I already told you, man—you’re barking up the wrong tree. Hell, you ain’t even in the right neighborhood…or for that matter, growing zone. Or whatever.”  
  
He paused, catching his breath.  
  
“But, worst case? Uh. Yeah. Know what? Let’s just not even go there.”  
  
He shuddered, his lips curling in disgust.  
  
“So how ‘bout we just say…I’ve never had a membership at your, uh… _‘gym’_. Nor do I ever plan on it. Not even one of those 24 hour guest pass deals, okay?” He gave one sharp jerk of his head, before spinning away to stab violently at the button for his parking level. “Okay then.”  
  
As if by divine intervention (and if it was so, I had to hand it to God, he  _did_  have some great comedic timing) the doors dinged open right then and there, and he hurriedly stalked off into the garage.  
  
And how I resisted making some sort of dig about taking the whole ‘gym’ analogy way too far…well, that was really beyond me. Instead, I managed to actually do the smart thing for once and just focused on getting to my own car—and away from  _him_ —as fast as my legs could carry me.  
  
Even the loud echo of his damn loafers in the hollow space of the garage annoyed me, made me squint my eyes against the wince that each receding click caused in my own body.  
  
I needed a drink, and I needed it now.  
  
Hell, five minutes ago wouldn’t be soon enough.

  


**::**

  


I steered my car towards the exit, resisting the urge to count down the number of loops it would require to get me out to street level, to get me to relief—toblood. But I hadn’t even gotten halfway there, when I was hit by the scent,  _that_  scent.  
  
Could it be? Could I actually get  _this_  lucky? The latest evidence—namely, the events of the last 48 or so hours—would suggest quite the contrary. But hey, maybe my luck was finally turning. Because judging by the scent, its owner had to be inside this very building.  
  
Close, and getting closer.  
  
Driving on, I turned around each corner with an ever-growing excitement; I imagine my face had much in common with that of a kid rushing down the stairs on Christmas morning. Because with the scent growing so strong, it really  _did_  have to be just around the next bend.  
  
As it turned out, it was just around the third bend.  
  
Right where I’d left Smith only a few minutes ago.  
  
But all thoughts of that asshole quickly vanished as I spotted my target. She had her victim cornered and trapped, and all I could do was advance towards her, without so much as a conscious thought as to what I was actually doing. Or rather, what I  _would_  do once I got there. As I got closer, she threw her head back on a laugh, revealing her own profile as well as the horror-frozen face of her victim. And that’s when my decision was made. For me, or by me, I couldn’t really be so sure.  
  
It was  _him_. Dean Smith.  
  
Seeing him like that, all vulnerable and staring at his own mortality—well, it snapped something in me. Probably my connection to reality. Or to my sense of self-preservation. Or both.  
  
I barely even registered the words  _Stop!_  and  _Get the hell away from him!_ , as they seemed to form in my mouth without even the slightest of participation from my brain. I listened to them with a certain detached passivity, much the same way I was now watching my own hand rise. It was as if it was not really mine, not attached to my own body, even though it moved in a gesture that was quite familiar to me, the first knuckles bending into an angry claw.  
  
It was much like watching a movie.  
  
The twin looks of surprise and horror on the woman and her victim would have been comical, if I hadn’t been quite as occupied with concentrating all of the freaky powers coming out of my hand onto the woman.  
  
Most satisfying of all, was the hiss of pain that spilled out of her when the unnatural energy slammed into her, even as she stumbled back and away from her would-be victim.  
  
 _Exactly what I’d wanted._  The grin I could feel spreading over my lips didn’t have any warmth in it, yet it was oh so very full of satisfaction. Giddy with it, even.  
  
She was inching away, body arching rather gymnastically with the pain shooting through it. One step, two steps and then three, and finally I had enough room to work with, throwing a burst of power that flung her through the air and across the way to the nearest wall. Which just so happened to be a good twenty feet away. Just far enough for those dependable laws of physics—velocity and mass and all that good stuff—to create a glorious harmonic crack of flesh and bones against concrete. It was soon followed by a dull thud when the body hit the ground after limply sliding its way down the wall.   
  
I had almost (and blissfully so, I might add) forgotten about the man standing behind me—the one with a front row seat to the freak show. ( _My_  freak show. Or rather, the freak show that was me. Ah, semantics.)  
  
But that was only until the click of loafer heel against concrete splintered the silence, followed close behind by a sharp intake of breath, shaky and obscenely loud in the empty space of the garage. Alerting me to his presence was probably the last thing he’d intended, if the way that he was now plastering himself to the wall—as if he might be able to actually melt right into it—was any indicator.  
  
I should have been angry. I should have been worried. I should have had every instinct screaming at me at that moment—not only for the fact that this man had witnessed what I could do (which was so obviously  _not_  human), but also because I’d just caught him trying to escape. Which is why I was as surprised as he was when I was at his side in the next moment, with concern for his safety foremost in my mind. In fact, it seemed to blot out everything else that  _should_  have been on my mind.  
  
I  _needed_  to know that he was okay, my hands sliding all over him, searching for any signs that he’d been hurt.  
  
It took him clearing his throat for me to realize how very close I’d gotten to him—that I had all but wrapped myself around him.  
  
His eyes held me, burning up with indignation, but the fear the lurked behind kind of ruined the effect he was going for. Despite all of that, I still could not bring myself to pull away; not until I could be certain that he was unharmed.  
  
“Did she hurt you?” I demanded.  
  
He blinked those ridiculously girly lashes at me. And he looked so lost…so young. I had to physically restrain myself from giving in to the ridiculous urge to hold his hand.  
  
“I….yeah. I mean. No. No, ‘m fine,” he stammered.  
  
My breath eased with the relief of that. That is, until my eyes caught on his shirt, on the unmistakable rust-red stain there.  
  
“What’s this, then?” I hissed.  
  
His eyes dropped to the spot immediately, his face blanching as he reached to touch it with his own hand.  _His bloody hand._  
  
I had never felt weak at the sight of blood, but suddenly, everything else went black around me and all I could see was Smith’s neat, perfectly manicured fingernails stained with the red stuff. Which is maybe why it took me so long to realize that he was talking to me, trying to get my attention. He’d been at it long enough for him to truly panic at my lack of response, and reach that hand out to grab at my shirt, using his grip on it in an attempt to shake me out of it, back to the here and now.  
  
“Dude!” he insisted. “I’m fine!”  
  
Our eyes connected for a split second before he let go of my shirt and went for his own, pulling the collar aside to reveal perfectly smooth, clean skin. No wound in sight.  
  
And if my eyes happened to skip along the smattering of freckles, lingering and wondering—  
  
“See?” he let his shirt drop closed again, abruptly ending my game of connect-the-oh-so-pretty-Dean-dots.  
  
“Not my blood. Just…” he shrugged—again. It seemed to be a habit when he was trying to brush off a situation, to regain that control he seemed to like holding onto so very tightly. “Must be hers. Must’ve scratched her or somethin’…when I was fightin’ her off before.”  
  
As the truth of that sunk into me, so did the scent of blood.  _That_  scent.  
  
I planted my feet to the spot and closed my eyes. But still, try as I might, I just couldn’t shut it out. I could feel my nostrils flare wider as that scent hit me—hell, slammed into me—with each and every inhale, regardless of the fact that I was trying to take in as little air as possible.  
  
And now that I’d indentified it, it was impossible not to be aware—with every single fiber of my being—that the scent was not coming from the man in front of me, but rather, from somewhere behind me. And god, I wanted nothing more than to go to it, to bury my face in it and fill my mouth and my throat and my  _blood_  with it. But Smith had already seen enough. Too much, really. I had to the smart thing here. I could not expose myself any more than I already had.  
  
But then again...I already had. That was the entire point.  
  
 _If he’d already seen too much,_  that little voice deep inside me was saying, the one that was either really stupid or just too smart for my own good,  _well then what difference would a little more really make, in the grand scheme of things?_  
  
I cracked my eyes open and stole a glance at him. He’d remained glued in his place, his whole body plastered against the wall, every muscle held tight as he watched me from behind big round saucer like eyes. Really, he presented the most perfect picture of the cornered animal, and I would have found it completely hilarious and hell, even adorable, if it wasn’t so clear that he was just as equally disgusted.  
  
 _By me._  
  
And could I really blame him?  
  
After all, it’s not every day that one comes face to face with a real live  _monster._  
  
Suddenly, giving in to that scent seemed like a pretty good idea after all. If nothing else, it was sure to wipe away the horrible taste that was currently filling my mouth. And surely, it couldn’t do much to change this guy’s impression of me—at least not a whole lot  _more_ , anyways.  
  
With that decided, I straightened up and gave my shirt a quick adjustment. Nodding faintly—more so to confirm my decision to myself than anything—I turned on my heel and started heading towards what appeared to be a lifeless pile of twisted-wrong limbs. But the faint rise and fall of breath told me that there was still just a little bit of life left in there, at least for the two or so minutes it would take for me to chug down the last of it. I could already taste it on the back of my tongue.  
  
I took another step, but froze midway as it hit me. Because as much as I did not wish to think about the audience at my back, it—he— _was_  nonetheless there. And the last thing I needed was for him to get any bright ideas about making an attempt to change that.  
  
I looked at him over my shoulder, cocking my head and smiling a crooked smile when I saw that he’d chosen to remain just as I’d left him.  _Like a good little boy_  
  
“Stay,” I growled out, watching him with a warning set to my face until he jerked his head in silent assent, being careful not to move any other part of his body.  
  
I turned my attention back to the woman, kneeling beside her as I let the heady scent flood into me, hoping it would manage to crowd out any thoughts of the man behind me.  
  
The blood helped.  
  
 _A lot._  
  
Unfortunately, it seemed to be over before it really even got started. One moment, the blood was sliding down my throat and coating it in the most delicious way imaginable, and the next, I suddenly found myself sucking oh so very uselessly on nothing at all. I let go of the drained body, still hunched over it as I lifted my head and blinked my eyes open. As the bumpy concrete of the garage wall came into focus, I decided that no, I was not ready to come back to reality—to my reality—quite yet. I tilted my head back, letting my eyes fall shut again as I savored the taste still remaining on my lips.  
  
Of course, the gasp that came from behind me startled me right out of my moment. Eyes snapping open, I whipped my head around towards the spot the noise had come from.  
  
It wasn’t like I was surprised to see Smith there. Still, the way those big pretty eyes of his looked all bugged out from behind the hand he held clamped tightly over his mouth…well, I couldn’t help the way it made my lips split into a grin. It wasn’t meant to be malicious, but it sure as hell must’ve looked that way.  
  
He shuddered, eyes going even wider for a fraction of a second.  
  
I knew it was probably the sight of my blood stained teeth that had done that to him, but really, that knowledge only made my grin that much wider, feral even, not to mention that it seemed to also draw me to him. I was on my feet and stalking towards him before I even realized what I was doing, loving the way it made him try to shrink even further into the wall.  
  
As I advanced on him, I noticed his eyes were drawn to the bloody knife I was still gripping in the hand at my side. I starting twirling it playfully, watching the way Smith’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his throat as he swallowed thickly, before slowly forcing his gaze away from the knife and back up to my own eyes. He held himself tight and didn’t so much as flinch—though he  _did_  look like he was having a good old fight with himself  _not_  to—even when I crowded him, even when I slammed one of my palms into the wall right next to his head.  
  
I lowered my head until our lips almost met, and still, he didn’t move. Even though I could feel his already unsteady breath speed up and stutter against my own lips, he still refused to  _give_ , hardened eyes meeting me without budging one inch.  
  
My lips turned up into a grudgingly impressed smile.  
  
“Mmm,” I hummed, then started to drag the tip of the blade down along the sensitive skin under his jaw line, until I’d reached that spot right below his chin.

Pressing the blade a tiny bit deeper, just shy of piercing the skin, I used it to tilt his head back. I rewarded him with a pleased little grin when the angle was just right, so that it forced his eyes to look up into mine, with our lips always almost touching.

“Just what  _are_  gonna do about you now... _Mr. Smith?_ ”

He swallowed painfully, the force of it straining against the blade as it slid past it and down his throat.

I ran the knife along his neck lazily, watching its movement as I drew it down across the dip of his collarbone.

“You know…” I tapped the blade against the spot where the bone stretched out the skin oh so delicately, much like one might tap a finger against their chin in deep contemplation, and then raised my eyes back up to his. “You  _have_  kind of tied my hands here.”

But he just stared right back at me, jaw muscles working for a second before he lifted his chin defiantly and stared off into the distance.

“What, got nothin’ to say?” I teased.

He didn’t reply, just flicked his eyes over to me for a second, before looking away again as he jutted his chin out even farther. The corner of my mouth tipped into a smirk, which had the unfortunate side effect of mostly ruining the credibility of the disappointed sound that I’d made in response.

“Not gonna even  _try_  to change my mind?”

He glared at me for a long moment, and then fixed me with an ice cold smile.

“’M thinkin’ not much I can say here s'gonna change anything at this point—your mind, or otherwise.”

I merely grunted in response. We watched each other for a long moment, before I finally broke it with a brisk nod, my lips curling into a sad smile.

“Ah, well,” I said at long last, fingers tracing along his cheek, and then reaching back to cup the back of his head. “Not just a pretty face, then.  _Pity._ ”

With no more warning than that, I knotted my fingers in his hair and pulled— _hard_. I dipped my head down to press my face right into his newly exposed neck, all in one smooth, if rather violent, motion. Yet, I was unable to tear my eyes away from him, watching the downright fucking  _delectable_  way his eyes went wide and his mouth parted on an almost silent gasp when his head was pulled back into such an unnatural angle, but he still struggled to keep his gaze on me—on what I was doing.

Or rather, on what I was  _about_  to do, I supposed.

After what seemed like far too long, and like it had required entirely too much effort, I managed to shut my eyes against it—to force myself to shut the sight of  _him_ out—tightening my grip on his hair and turning my face into his skin, nosing at the pulse point there.

But my eyes flew open with the shock of what I found there.

Or rather, what I  _didn’t_  find there.

Because there was absolutely nothing.

_Nothing._

Even less than nothing, quite possibly.

Not only was his blood utterly devoid of all scent—at least through the un-punctured skin, that is—but it also did absolute nothing  _for_  me.

There was no pressing need to tear into him, no urgent hunger for the blood that I could plainly feel pulsing underneath my lips where they were resting over his skin, just separated from me by one tiny well-placed slash of my knife-wielding hand. I moved the knife back up to his pulse point, twirling the point of it right there where I had it poised above his skin, rolling my head against his shoulder and whining somewhere deep in the back of my throat.

Because this…made no sense.

No.

No sense whatsoever. None of it.

Sure, I knew that I tended to go for a certain type. But that habit had been borne out of my conclusion that if I had to kill…well then, I might as well go for people that wouldn’t be too sorely missed by anyone in particular; people that most likely wouldn’t be such a great loss for the general human gene pool. But I’d always thought of it as just a matter of preference…a dining choice, of sorts. Some people went for vanilla, some for chocolate. That didn’t mean they couldn’t settle for the latter when that what the only option on the menu.

And this revelation—as interesting as it may have been—did absolutely nothing to help solve my current pressing problem. My walking, talking problem—well, I should say an extremely large likelihood of talking. Either way, it was a problem that was entirely too much of a risk,  _an unknown_ , to be left untaken care of; untied, as it were.

_But could it be?_

Try as I might, I could not stop my mind from traveling (or to be more precise,  _careening at violently high speeds_ ) down this path.  _Could_  it actually be possible that I was only able to drink— _and kill_ —certain types of people?

No, I couldn’t let myself think about it, or about what all of that could possibly mean. Not right now, anyways.

Because right now? Right now what I really couldn’t stop thinking about was how truly and thoroughly fucked up my luck had turned out to be. That the one person I really  _did_  need to get rid of—a threat I simply could not afford to  _not_  eliminate—also just so happened be one of the people that was apparently not compatible with my diet.

Frustrated, and with the world feeling like it was pushing in too close all around me, I flipped the knife on its edge and pressed it down, feeling the skin go tight to the point of almost giving—but no further.  _No further._  Just holding it there, feeling that tension of  _almost_ , that perfect balance of fight almost collapsing into surrender, but still straining with the delicious struggle of it.

The familiarity of it was grounding, in some inexplicable way.

And I needed that. Because I had to think—had to figure this out, figure  _something_  out. And I couldn’t do it with everything moving under my feet.

That just so happened to be the moment when I felt it.

 _It_  being the oh so eager salutation of Junior Mr. Smith, twitching its hello against my thigh.

Seeing as he didn’t appear to be too keen on talking about it, at least judging by the way he was still studiously avoiding my eyes, I decided the best (and most fun) course of action would be to try and answer my own question. So I gave an experimental dig with the knife, pushing it even harder this time around. The reward was instantaneous and beyond worth it, his breath hitching raggedly even as his body answered for him with another twitch, this one even stronger, and made his erection grow enough so that I could clearly feel the outline of it where it dug into my leg.

_Huh. The plot thickens…right along with Mr. Smith, so it would seem._

I lifted my head off his shoulder to look at him. But his face betrayed nothing, gaze locked straight ahead in an unseeing sort of way, as if he was forcing himself not to focus on anything; like he was trying to distance himself from his own body.

Placing my leg between his, I pressed it against his growing bulge, just to see the way his eyes fluttered shut against his will, the way his face gave, even if it was just for a split second before he regained that iron-tight control. And the moan that I was rewarded with —muffled though it was through his tightly sealed lips—well, that was just the icing on the cake.

I let my head drop back down into the crook of his neck and pushed in closer, my own obscenely tenting bulge grinding into him and causing his back to slam into the wall, hard enough to leave a mark—on Smith and quite possibly the wall itself. His hands shot up to close around my shoulders, fingers digging in, not pulling me in any closer, but not pushing me away either. Really, it felt mostly like he was using his hold as an anchor, holding himself completely still even as the fine trembling of his legs threatened to betray him.

And me? Well, I couldn’t really bring myself to do anything but watch—the show was just too good to pass up. So I slowly stilled my own movements, as I watched and waited for it; the snap, the break that was surely coming any moment now.

His fingers were sinking deeper and deeper, like he was falling and the only thing holding him up was his grip, like he was helpless to do much of anything other than try to hold on tighter as he waited for the force of gravity to finally, inevitably, pull him under.

_And then it did._

And to be perfectly honest, it probably pulled us  _both_  under just as much.

It started with the unmistakable feel of his cock jerking once more, stronger yet than any of the ones that came before, immediately followed by the snapping forward of his hips, as if they were somehow trying to catch up after it. And that, coupled with the deep, almost gravelly moan that escaped his lips, and the way his pulse started to slam hard and fast under my lips, that proved to be just too damn much.

And not even  _close_  to enough.

So I did the only thing I could, pressing my tongue flat against the spot, feeling it jackhammer into it—and into me—before I completely lost myself, and all that seemed to matter was sucking and biting and licking and just getting to every and any bit of skin of his that lay within reach.

I distantly registered the feel of his fingers sinking even deeper into my shoulder blades, until they seemed to hit bottom, stilling. And then he was trying to pull me down and pull himself up simultaneously, making little frustrated noises at the unsatisfactory results of his efforts.

It was far too easy to just give him exactly what he wanted—grabbing onto that tight little ass of his and dragging his all too cooperative body higher up onto my thigh, high enough so that I could rest my own knee up against the wall and use it to balance the both of us. And it was pretty much impossible not to think about how much I  _liked_  the fact that it was so very easy to push and press and fucking  _mold_  him around me into exactly what I wanted. Even more so because he seemed to feel exactly the same way, judging by the way his whole body spasmed violently for a moment before going completely still and rigid; it was almost like he’d literally fallen apart right then and there.

He sucked in a couple of breaths, shallow and ragged. And then his hands clutched even tighter onto my shirt, the hold like an anchor as he started rolling his hips up and just basically rutting into my thigh, alternating between pushing off and pressing into my hands.

Since he seemed to no longer really require a whole lot of my assistance, I let one of my hands drop away, flattening the palm to the wall above his shoulder and using the newly acquired extra leverage to grind my own cock against his hip.

It became obvious pretty damn quickly that that  _really_  did it for him, not in small part in the way his own movement went all sharp and stuttery. But most of all, it was in the way he seemed to transform into a complete and shameless slut—an extremely loud one at that. In fact, the way he was moaning, all needy and desperate and just this side of honest-to-god  _whimpery_ , it was almost like he was doing it up for the camera in some low-budget porn that hadn’t been able to invest much in a good sound system, or something. Barking up the wrong tree my ass. Or his.

But even more shocking, was that those delicious little noises of his were mere punctuations to the obscenely filthy mouth that he seemed to have magically acquired, with “Fuckgodfuuuuck yeahyeahyeah,” and “More. More. Needfuckingmore” and “C’mon, c’mon. Harder, yeah,” all interspersed with a chorus of  _“God”_  and  _“Yeah”_  and  _“Pleasepleaseplease”_.

It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...except the porn version.

And as unexpected (and rather hilarious) as it all was—it was also incredibly fucking hot.

It made me pretty much unable to see or want or even so much as think about anything  _other_  than giving him all those bruises he was begging so prettily for, as well as want nothing more than to fuck all of those deliciously dirty words right out of him—that is, until I could reduce him to nothing more than random syllables that lacked all semblance of coherence.

And so that was exactly what I set about doing.

**::**

When I’d insisted that I would have to drive him home, he’d relented fairly quickly. Sure, he put up a bit of fight—that was only to be expected.  
  
But if I was to let him go—after all that he’d seen tonight—there were just some precautions that I had to put in place. Namely, I had to know at least as much about Dean Smith, as he already knew about me. Barring that, I at least had to know where I could find him. Or rather, it was more so that  _he’d_ know that I knew where to find him.  
  
Really, neither of us had a choice but to let me take him home.  
  
In the end, despite his protestations to the contrary, we both knew just how true it was. All it took was just one look into my eyes, and he knew it wasn’t an offer I had made out of the goodness of my heart—much as he knew that it wasn’t really an offer at all.  
  
Still, he kept up appearances, indicating his agreement with a faint nod before pushing past me and making his way toward my waiting car.  
  
And if I couldn’t help but smile at his mile-long stubborn streak—more than apparent in the tense sulky line of his shoulders as he retreated towards my car—well, the only other person to witness it was one decidedly bloodless body. And as I picked her up and secured her into the waiting bag in the trunk, I wasn’t really all that worried that she’d be doing much talking.


	5. Chapter 5

_Everyone hides who they are, at least some of the time. As for me, I know there is no choice—never has been. Because if I ever did let someone get close enough, then they’d see who I really am. **What**  I really am.  _ _And I can’t let that happen._

__  


  
“Well there you go, sweetheart. Door to door service.”  
  
Smith rolled his eyes.  
  
“Gee. I’d say thanks, but...” he finished his sentence with a shrug and a thin, fake smile.  
  
I quirked an eyebrow at him, but his only response was to keep on staring right back at me, eyes glinting with defiance.  
  
The silent standoff was starting to stretch out just a bit too long, right past high noon territory. But then Smith shuffled around, digging in his pockets for his keys and made an awkward motion which I supposed was meant to indicate that he was going to head in now.  
  
I gasped dramatically, clutching at my chest for maximum effect.  
  
“Aww, you mean you’re not even gonna invite me in for a drink? I’m wounded.”  
  
He froze, shoulders going rigid, taking a moment before responding. When he turned his face back towards mine, his lips curled up into a crooked smile, somehow managing to pull off amused and mean all at once.  
  
“I dunno...” he drawled. “Seemed like you already had  _plenty_  to drink there,  _big boy_.”  
  
Panic flashed across his face for just a fraction of a second, as if he’d realized how unwise that particular taunt might have been as soon as he heard the words spoken out loud. I hurried to school the shock off of my face, saying nothing but just nodding at him, with a smile twitching at the corner of my mouth.  
  
Because, wow.  _Touché_.  
  
His face relaxed minutely. He continued to keep his eyes on me though, foot sliding back to prop against the wall behind him as he leaned back. I watched him for a moment, until I finally forced myself to snap out of it.  
  
“Well, you have sweet dreams now,  _honey_ ,” I told him, voice dropped low and dripping with syrupy sweetness, leaning down to press my lips to his cheek. “Of  _me_...if you’re lucky.”  
  
I chuckled at the way his body went rigid at that, even more so at the indignant sound that accompanied it. But I didn’t move away just yet. Instead, bringing my lips to rest right beside his ear, I made sure that when I spoke, I’d ever so lightly brush the sensitive spot inside of his lobe.  
  
“Now, you be sure to lock up safe n’ tight now—can never be  _too_  careful.”  
  
And with a wink, I turned and walked away.  
  
“Uh, wait!”  
  
I was just a few steps from the door when his hesitant plea stopped me dead in my tracks.  
  
I turned around slowly, to the sight of Smith watching me cautiously.  
  
He glanced down and away, scratching nervously at the back of his neck.  
  
“I just—just wanted to thank you.” He peered up at me with a sheepish grin. “Guess I never  _did_  actually thank you. For, y’know, saving my life back there, n’ all…”  
  
He trailed off, and all I could do was just stand there in stunned silence.  
  
He cleared his throat.  
  
“So yeah,” he flicked his eyes away with a one-shouldered shrug. “This is me. Doin’ that.”  
  
He looked back towards me as soon as the last word was out, throwing me a final grateful smile, even if it was a bit strained around the edges.  
  
“Uh, yeah. Sure,” I said dismissively.“Don’t mention it, man.”  
  
I raised my brow pointedly at him, watching him swallow thickly and nod his understanding before I looked away, giving a firm approving nod as I turned around and once more started making my way towards the exit.  
  
But I’d only taken about two steps when he stopped me again.  
  
I spun around, giving him a questioning look that was a blend of shock and amusement. He smiled shyly, turning his eyes away. I noticed that now, the expression seemed more genuine, and I found myself wondering vaguely how many times I’d have to make sure he smiled at me before he was completely at ease.  
  
“I just—”  
  
He broke off, rubbing at the back of his neck again. It was clearly a nervous habit, and I preferred to pretend that I wasn’t starting to actually learn his tells. After a few seconds, he raised his face, looking up imploringly at some spot on the ceiling.  
  
“God, I can’t believe I’m  _actually_  doing this,” he muttered, more to himself than to me, ducking his head back down as he shook it in disbelief.  
  
After another long silence, he visibly forced himself to tear his hand away from where it still clutched convulsively at the back of his neck, raising hesitant and apprehensive eyes to meet mine.  
  
I cocked an eyebrow at him.  
  
He studied me carefully, cautious but searching, until something seemed to shift behind his eyes.  He sucked in a breath—deep enough to make his shoulders rise with the effort—letting it out on a long, slow exhale before finally speaking.  
  
“Look, man. You can’t go out there like that.”  
  
He waved his hand around in my general direction.  
  
When I didn’t have a response for him, just stood there with a blank look, he didn’t even try to hide his irritated groan. He made another spastic motion with his hand.  
  
“Dude, you’ve got blood all over you!”    
  
His eyes went wide and he blanched as soon as the words were out. He instantly tried to hide his reaction by keeping his eyes affixed to some spot that seemed to be located somewhere in the vicinity of his toes. But he braved a glance at me barely a moment later, only to find me smirking back at him—oh so very giddily. Obviously displeased at that, he made an unhappy noise somewhere deep in his throat, jaw muscles working overtime at swallowing it down.  
  
That only made me move in closer, my smirk going wider, darker. No doubt appearing like a predator spotting some easy prey.  
  
“And why exactly do you even  _care_ , Mr. Smith?”  
  
“Honestly, I don’t know,” he muttered under his breath.  
  
He seemed to be thinking it over, lost in his own head space, for several painfully long moments. Finally, he seemed to remember himself and shook his head as if to clear it. Looking over at me, he brushed it off as a bitter little smile turned the line of his lips flat and hard.  
  
“Guess you could say that at this point, I  _ **am**_  kinda invested in you not getting caught.”  
  
And then, like the flick of a switch, his face turned to one of nothing but fierce determination, every line—from the slope of his shoulders to the jut of his jaw—an unspoken challenge.  
  
And only making the fear that was still behind those emerald _-_ green eyes of his that much more apparent.  
  
Really, it was so damn adorable, how could I be expected to  _not_  move in closer? To stop my predator’s leer from growing, no doubt looking all the more feral with the blood that had now dried all around it, its crusty edges cracking with the stretch of the skin underneath it?  
  
“Is that right?”  
  
My voice had dropped into a low purr as I stepped into his space, pressing my palm to the wall beside his head. He gritted his teeth and glared at me out of the corner of his eye.  
  
“Yeah, well. If you get caught leaving  _my_  apartment building looking like that… it doesn’t really look too good for me,  _now does it?_ ”  
  
I looked at him steadily, clearly unconvinced. After a few minutes worth of a silent stare off, he pushed off the wall with a sigh and a pointed roll of his eyes.  
  
“Just. Come on already,” he grumbled, after he’d turned toward the door and raised the keys to the lock. “Before I change my mind.”  
  
He rushed through the doorway, but then suddenly paused, hand gripping around the edge of the door tight enough to make the knuckles pull the skin white. I’d still been mid-step myself, when my forward progress was abruptly halted by Smith’s palm pressed flat against my chest. Both our eyes were instantly drawn over to that hand. We stared at it wordlessly, with only the sound of our strained breathes to fill the silence around us.  
  
He drew it back sharply a moment later, looking up at me with a sheepish smile before his eyes darted away.  
  
“I—” He stopped himself, clamping his mouth shut as he reached back to tug at the nape of his neck.“Just. Uh. Let’s just get some things straight first—before you come inside, yeah?”  
  
I nodded my assent. He pulled himself up to his full height and squared his shoulders, looking like he was trying to make his body take up as much room as possible.  
  
“You only go where I say you can—nowhere else. Got it?”  
  
He eyed me hard, head tipping back to meet my gaze as he waited for my answer. It was clear that he was still struggling with this, struggling with convincing himself that he had not just done the absolute stupidest thing imaginable by inviting the monster at his doorstep—a bloodthirsty killer as witnessed by his very own eyes not even one full hour ago—into his home.  
  
As tempting as it was to make some sort of bad joke about rescinding invitations, I held my tongue and instead simply nodded at him and smiled my most reassuring smile. Well, as reassuring as a blood-encrusted smile could ever hope to be.  
  
“Sure,” I added in a soft tone.  
  
Because it was plainly obvious that he needed to do this by his rules—that he needed to know that  _I_  would do this by his rules. Since he  _was_  doing me a favor here, no matter how much he may have tried to convince me or himself otherwise, I figured it was the least I could do to play along. He gave a tight nod in acknowledgment, but kept his eyes fixed on me as he stood there blocking the doorway.  
  
“You don’t touch anything, don’t even look at anything.”  
  
He arched a brow at me and watched me carefully until I gave another nod.  
  
That seemed to do it. He let out a long breath, his grip on the door loosening as his whole body seemed to sort of deflate as well.  
  
“Okay,” he whispered, more to himself than to me, jerking his head as he turned towards the apartment.  
  
He stepped inside and left the door ajar for me to follow him inside, mumbling another ‘okay’ to himself as he went. I let the door fall shut behind me and followed close on his heel, almost toppling the both of us over to the floor when he abruptly stopped in front of me only a few steps later. My hands shot out instinctively, steadying the both of us, before I noticed they were curled around his biceps. I hastily pulled them away with an apologetic half-smile.  
  
 _Oops. Not even two minutes, and I was already breaking those rules of his._  
  
He seemed to teeter for a moment without the support of my hands, before he managed to regain his center of gravity. His hands were suddenly on his tie, tugging it into place and then moving on to straighten his suit, the tightness in his face seeming to dissolve away in direct proportion to the number of non-existent creases he smoothed out from his jacket.  
  
“Just—” he held up his hand in front of me, then let it drop with a frustrated sigh. “You just—stay right here.”  
  
His eyes jumped around the room, until they appeared to land on something right behind me. He motioned towards it with a twitch of his chin.  
  
“There,” he said, giving me one last haughty glare before he stalked past me and into what seemed to serve as the dining area.  
  
A man’s home is supposedly his castle. Even when there is a potential enemy in it. I wondered how much of the monster he saw when he looked at me, and whether fear outweighed whatever sense of obligation I might’ve earned in his eyes for rescuing him.  
  
He kicked out one of the chairs, waiting for me to understand and make my way towards it. He stood right where he was and just kept watching me, until I was seated in the intended chair, earning one sharp inclination of approval.  
  
“You stay here. And I’ll—I’ll just go get the stuff.”  
  
He jerked his thumb towards the back of the apartment.  
  
“Be right back,” he murmured, throwing me one last warning look over his shoulder before disappearing down the hallway.  
  
I stared at his retreating form and watched the way he didn’t rush, how instead he seemed to be dragging his steps. And I honestly couldn’t decide if that made me happy or sad. Hell, if it was what I should have expected, or quite the opposite.

**::**

  
  
When Smith returned a few minutes later, he didn’t even spare a glance my way; just made a beeline for the table, pulling out another chair so that he could stand in front of it unobstructed, as he set down the items he’d brought out. First came a plush white towel, folded so incredibly neatly that its edges were lined up perfectly, not so much as a fraction of an inch of overhanging fabric. I was so distracted by the sight of it—by the absolute flawless perfection of the technique—that I’d barely even noticed the bowl of still-steaming water that he’d set beside it. Not until he picked up the towel, unfolding it and setting it to hang over the edge of the bowl.   
  
I shook my head to try to clear it, and then raised my gaze to his.   
  
Which was the biggest fucking mistake.  _Ever._   
  
Because I suddenly found myself staring at what could quite reasonably be described as the striptease portion of a porno—regardless of whether or not it was intended as such. Smith was shrugging out of his suit jacket, and the way his back was curled as he concentrated on laying it around the back of the chair and then smoothing out any wrinkles—well, it made the fabric of his white Oxford shirt, not to mention his honest-to-god suspenders, tug and strain around his torso in the most unfair ways. It made it so very easy to see that he was thickly muscled underneath, wide and broad exactly where he should be—and narrow, almost delicate, in all the right spots too.   
  
He seemed oblivious to my ogling, or at least pretended to be so, as his fingers deftly worked to remove his cufflinks and set them on the table, before starting to slowly— _meticulously_ —roll the sleeve first on one arm, and then the other. The crisp, neat folds revealed golden overly tanned skin, which still managed to do absolutely nothing to hide the thick sprinkling of freckles there.   
  
I was so completely engrossed at the sight that I didn’t even realize it until several moments later.   
  
_He was completely smooth._   
  
I barely managed to conceal my (embarrassingly high-pitched) whine. Because there was just no natural way for a grown man to be that smooth. And if he’d worked so very thoroughly at getting himself smooth  _there_ , well then…I shut my eyes tight against the ridiculous urge to try to answer my own question with x-ray vision that I simply did not have.   


When I blinked them open again, I had to seriously consider whether he was just taunting me at this point. Because really—there was just no way a person could be so completely unaware that he looked like such a centerfold cliché. His head was tipped back, eyes shut with the thick sweep of his lashes just visible along the ridge of his cheekbones, and the shape of his Adam’s apple was straining against the long column of his neck, while he tugged at his tie to work it loose. With that done, his hand reached back behind him, causing the fabric of his shirt to strain around his chest as he rolled his neck and shoulders in tandem. He let out a low groan when his efforts were rewarded a moment later with the desired crack of joints and muscle.  
  
“Okay,” he murmured, straightening up and opening his eyes, only to startle when he saw that I’d been staring—was  _still_  staring.  
  
I somehow managed to resist the urge for a drool check, instead just giving him my best choirboy smile. He blinked several times, all blank and dazed looking, before he forcefully snapped himself out of it with a rough shake of his head.  
  
“Right. Right, yeah,” he mumbled, ducking his head.  
  
I was beginning to appreciate that habit of his. It was very cute in a sexy sort of way.  
  
“You sure ‘bout that, now?” I drawled out, lazy and warm.  
  
He huffed out a laugh. It seemed to relax him: the tension visibly drained from his body.  
  
“Yeah,” he said, voice still filled with self-deprecating amusement. And then, a second later, more certain—sure and steady. “Yeah.”  
  
With that, he turned around and reached for the bowl, wrapping his hands around the back of it and pulling it forward to the edge of the table. He grabbed the towel—perfectly white except for the crisp blue monogrammed  _DS_ —and dipped it into the water. As I sat there watching him wring the moisture out of the pristine whiteness of the thing, I couldn’t help but think about how this was not the wisest choice on his part.  
  
And really, why the hell did I even care?  
  
The touch of scalding hot wetness to my face startled me out of my thoughts, making me wince before I could stop the reflexive reaction. Smith was looking down at me, eyes nervous and questioning as his hand froze in midair a mere inch from my face. I gave him an encouraging smile, then closed my eyes and waited for him to resume his task.  
  
I let my legs fall open wider, smile growing wider to silently communicate my approval when Smith stepped into the offered space almost as soon as I’d made it available to him. At the feel of still hesitant fingers grabbing hold of my chin a moment later, I made myself go as limp and pliant as possible, allowing my face to be easily moved with no more than some guiding of his hand as he gently lifted it and started to swipe the towel along my jaw and neck. When I opened my eyes after a little while, Smith was thoroughly absorbed in his task, eyes intently fixed on the path of the cloth over my skin.  
  
I studied him closely for a moment, before clearing my throat to get his attention. When his eyes snapped over to mine, I met his gaze steadily with a soft smile.  
  
“Hey, so can I ask you something?”  
  
He froze for a moment, breath stuttering. At last, he gave me a faint nod, eyes sliding back over to where his hand had paused over my blood-stained cheek.  
  
“Sure,” he added, giving a reluctant nod for me to go on as he started to wipe down the underside of my jaw.  
  
“I mean....‘s not like it would make  _that_  much of a difference if I said no.”  
  
I huffed out a laugh at that. “No. I guess not.”  
  
I waited for what seemed like a suitably polite pause, watching Smith until he looked to be absorbed in his task again.  
  
“I just can’t help but wonder,  _Mr. Smith_ …”  
  
I ignored the urge to grin at the way his whole body seemed to go rigid at my words, delivered as they were in such a blatant mockery of business-like formality.  
  
“What exactly  _would_  possess a fine upstanding citizen such as yourself, to invite a known criminal into your home? A killer, at that?”  
  
He remained silent, his only visible response the intermittent jumping of his jaw muscles. That is, until the next swipe of the cloth dragged entirely too roughly against the sensitive skin at the corner of my mouth. I chose to ignore it. For the moment, anyways.  
  
“I mean…what? Is it like some massive bad boy kink you got there, or…?”  
  
My voice had pitched low and rough as my eyes raked over him, slow and lazy, before finishing it all off with a wink.  
  
This time, when the cloth swiped at my skin too roughly, I was pretty sure it was intentional… of the premeditated variety. His satisfied little lopsided smirk that closely followed my wince, and the pained hiss of a breath that quickly followed it, only confirmed my hypothesis. Even worse, when the surprise in my eyes transformed into a burning glare, it only made that half smile of his turn into a full-out grin.  
  
But it faded away fairly quickly as he turned his focus back to cleaning off the blood that still clung to the skin around my lips, now wiping the cloth so gently that it almost tickled. I settled back down and accepted his un-worded apology, if only by process of keeping my mouth shut.  
  
Just about when I’d given up on getting any more of an answer out of him and started to close my eyes, his words drifted over to me, no more than a soft whisper.  
  
“I dunno, man.”  
  
His voice was halting, and my eyes blinked open just in time to catch his half-hearted shrug. I watched him from underneath lowered lashes, mesmerized by the way he kept his own eyes fixed on his work as he spoke, those pretty pretty lashes of his fringing long shadows across his cheekbones.  
  
“I mean, you already  _did_  know where I live, so…”  
  
He let the words hang in the air between us without finishing the sentence. After a while, he tacked on:  
  
“So it’s not exactly like it makes a whole lotta difference…now does it?”  
  
I didn’t have an answer for him. Not that I was all that certain if it was even me he was asking—or just himself. I just kept quiet as he continued to slowly, almost reverently clean my face. The steady rhythm of it, the way his eyes seemed to be focused but without really focusing… it almost seemed like he’d fallen into a trance. It was certainly making me feel like it would be so very easy to sink into a semiconscious daze if I’d only let myself. When he spoke again, after he’d turned back towards the table to rinse the towel out, his voice seemed shockingly loud, even though in actuality it really wasn’t much more than low murmur.  
  
“Besides, I figure if you were gonna kill me…you would’ve already done it by now.”  
  
He shot me a hesitant glance over his shoulder as he squeezed out the excess water over the bowl, eyes scanning over my face, obviously searching for something. I assumed it was an answer to his last statement, some sort of affirmation that he was right—or wrong. But honestly, I hadn’t answered that particular question in my own head quite yet… much less come to any sort of definitive conclusion as to the more general question of  _what was to be done with the problem of Mr. Smith_. Or rather, what  _I_  should do.  
  
Hell, if I were really being honest, it was really more of a question of what I could  _bring_  myself to do.  
  
His face did appear to fall a bit when he registered the non-answer in my face, before he hurried to turn it away from view. Which is why I was definitely not expecting the words that followed next, hesitant and muffled through his back though they were.  
  
“So, uh…mind if I ask  _you_  something?”  
  
After taking at least a beat too long to process the words, I grunted in agreement.  
  
“Yeah. Go 'head, man.”  
  
He cupped my chin gently and tilted my head back, examining my face in the light briefly before starting to alternate between wiping and scrubbing roughly at the dried up blood on my chin, clinging stubbornly to the somewhat heavy stubble growth there. He kept his eyes pointedly focused on his hand and its progress as he spoke.  
  
“I. Well I guess I was just wonderin’. Why  _was_  it exactly that you didn’t kill me—er. I mean,  _Drink_  me...I guess?”  
  
He flushed at his awkward stumbling over the words, but sneaked a glance at me from underneath his lashes a moment later.  
  
“Why…you complainin’?”  
  
I gave him my best greasy playboy smirk. He was quick to shrug it off. But it didn’t really do a whole lot to cover up the soft shiver that had run through his entire body at my taunt.  
  
 _Huh._  
  
“I just—”  
  
He broke off, scowling at his hand where it continued to wipe the blood off my face. He took a deep breath and dragged his teeth along the pouting curve of his lower lip before he finally seemed to find the words.  
  
“I dunno, man. It seemed like you were gonna...but then it was like you changed our mind. Or something.”  
  
 He shot me a quick questioning look, before turning back towards the table to rinse out the towel again.  
  
“Honestly? I don’t really know  _myself_ ,” I muttered.  
  
I turned it over in my head, letting out an appreciative groan when I felt the soothing warmth of the cloth at my throat  
  
“I guess...” My lips twitched into a lopsided smile. “I dunno…I suppose you could say it just wasn’t my flavor.”  
  
He drew back immediately at that, staring down at me with a thoroughly befuddled twist of lines between his eyebrows that for some inexplicable reason made my fingers itch with wanting to reach out and press it smooth.  
  
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he demanded, drawing a much too heavy sigh out of me as I looked away from the frantic searching of his eyes. Then, once I was freed of his imploring face, my mind wandered off on its merry little way to ponder the question—the question that I really, as it turned out, was wanting an answer for. Just as much as he did, apparently.   
  
“Everyone I kill...there’s—there’s a certain something in their blood. It’s—it’s something I can  _smell_.”  
  
Even as the thoughts formed into words and tumbled all too easily from my lips, I marveled at my stupidity, wondering exactly why it was that I couldn’t seem to  _not_  share excessively with this guy?  
  
“I never really thought about it like that,” I continued, “but I guess it must be something inside them. I know—I know that I’ve always been able to recognize that certain something that marked them as—” I looked over at him, shrugging as my lips twisted into an acerbic little smile. “ _Dinner_ , I guess. It must be something in their blood, then. Right?”  
  
I thought about it for a moment, pondering my own query.  
  
“I dunno. I just know it’s this, like, scent...that they all definitely had that smell on them.” I stopped, and looked over at him sharply.  “And that you definitely  _didn’t,_ y’know?”  
  
He nodded numbly, taking in the information, before returning the cloth to my face. I closed my eyes and let myself sink into the soothing sensation.  
  
“Yeah, I guess I always kinda guessed it was something like that. I mean. I  _have_  always gone to those sleaziest, seediest parts of town, to bars where I could be sure that I’d find exactly the right... _sort_.”   
  
My eyes snapped open a few seconds later when I heard him gasp. I found myself looking at Smith’s face, a face which was now transformed into a comically clichéd picture of the proverbial light bulb moment. Well, it would have been comical, if I hadn’t been so concerned at the moment as to what exactly it was that had put that expression there. I watched him cautiously as his eyes scanned rapidly over my face, remotely registering that his hand had suddenly gone stock still, paused where it was in mid-stroke.  
  
“Oh, holy crap,” he choked out, eyes still frenzied in their scrutiny of my face for  _something_ , breath coming in short and shallow rasps. A few long moments later, he swallowed hard, blinked once, then twice. And then it all came pouring out of him in a rush.  
  
“Oh my god, Sam. Oh my god.You only kill people with—with  _bad_  blood. Evil people!”  
  
Impossibly, his eyes grew even wider with that, even as his voice grew softer, more subdued; farther away, almost.  
  
“Well, shit. You’re actually…you’re actually probably doing the world a favor!”   
  
I circled a hand around his wrist—that is, the one attached to the hand which held the blood-soaked towel, soaked with the blood that  _I_  had spilled (granted, mostly consumed, but still)—and gave it a firm shake. His eyes immediately dropped to his wrist, before flicking back up to mine in question. I gave him a tense smile.  
  
“Are you done?"  
  
Confusion flickered over his face. I looked down pointedly at our hands, before looking back up at him. His eyes traveled down to our hands again, and he made a soft sound of understanding a moment later.  
  
I caught a glimpse of his Adam’s apple straining against his throat with a hard swallow before he ducked his head down and softly mumbled, “Uh, yeah. Yeah. Sure.”   
  
But his eyes slid over to my face, seemingly of their own free will, and he scoured my face again, kind of like he was trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it was he’d seen there a second ago. Or rather, of whatever it was he thought maybe  _could_  be there. He appeared to remember himself a moment later, shaking his head and turning his focus back to where he’d left off on his cleanup job.  
  
“Yeah. Just...one more second here.”  
  
His tongue stuck out of his mouth in concentration as he gave the skin to the left side of my lips a couple more swipes, before cupping my chin and using it to tilt my face up, turn it this way and that.  
  
“There,” he pronounced, nodding his head in satisfaction. Tossing the dirty towel somewhere behind me, his hands fell to my shoulders, where he busied himself with smoothing out the collar of the company-issued polo, now hopelessly ruined with the rust colored stains of dried blood.  
  
“You know,” he began, almost inaudibly.  
  
“If it’s true...I mean. If you  _are_  killing people who are making the world a  _worse_  place, well then—”  
  
He took a deep breath and let it out in a rush.  
  
“Well then, like it or not? By definition you’re—”  
  
I blindly grabbed for those stupidly proper suspenders of his and pulled, hard as I could manage from my seated position. It had the desired effect though, punching the breath—and the rest of that unwise sentence—right out of him, while at the same time bringing us nose to nose as he was forced into an awkward half-seated half-standing straddled position over my lap. I pushed my face even closer to his, lips brushing against his as I spoke.  
  
“I’m  _what_ , Mr. Smith?”  
  
Frightened-wide eyes stared back at me, blinking once. My lips twisted into a cruel smile.  
  
“What, you think I’m  _good_ , Mr. Smith? Hmm?”  
  
I spit the word ‘good’ out like it was some sort of curse, like it tasted bad, and arched a challenging brow at him. He looked back at me dazedly, giving a few more slow blinks that failed to bring any more clarity to those eyes.  
  
“I—”  
  
My hand shot up to cover his mouth, pushing down on it probably much more firmly  than was strictly necessary to stifle the rest of his words. When he seemed to finally get it and his mouth stopped moving underneath my palm, I pressed my face in closer, mashing our foreheads together.  
  
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I hissed. “Did I somehow give you the impression that I was looking for an answer from you there, boy?”  
  
His eyes looked like they might just pop out of his head for a second, but he held himself mostly still otherwise, and I gave him an encouraging smile for his efforts.  
  
“That’s right,” I whispered, loosening my grip on his mouth, before letting it drop entirely and trailing a finger along the bow of lower lip, then up to trace the line of his jaw.  
  
“No. I’ve always found my own answers.  _Had to._ ” I told him as I let my own eyes lazily follow the path of my finger along the sharp lines and angles of his face. But then my eyes slid back to his, holding him in place as much as the hand I had on his hip was.  
  
“Yeah. Don’t need no high n’ mighty  _suit_  to tell me shit I already know,  _Mr. Smith._ Plus, we wouldn’t want you overworking that pretty little head of yours, now would we?”  
  
I tipped my head back, pausing for a beat, like I was examining both his face and the question.  
  
“No. You’ll keep your pie hole shut. That is, unless I tell you otherwise—unless and until I tell you to open up nice n’ wide for me.”  
  
I relished the smile that spread over my lips as much as I did that full-bodied shiver of Smith’s that put it there. Because there was fear there, sure. But there was also something else there…something that begged as much as it cowered.  
  
“And you  _will_. Won’t you,  _Mr. Smith_?”  
  
My eyes fell to the mouth in question, transfixed by its tiny, soundless movements, before I slowly lifted my gaze back up to meet his. I grinned, all scrubbed bright and polite as can be.  
  
“Open up for me, I mean. All nice n’ big...just like a good little boy?”  
  
He just stared back at me, lips clamped shut and jaw muscle jumping dangerously. I slid my hand back to tangle in his hair and then tugged on it brutally, enough to force his head back and to make him suck in his next breath.  
  
“I said.  _Won’t_  you,  _Mr. Smith_?”  
  
He nodded once, wincing when all it managed to do was pull painfully at the roots of his hair. I smiled approvingly, using my hold on him to push our faces closer.  
  
“Oh yeah, you’ll open up that pretty mouth of yours real nice for me. Won’t you,  _sweetheart_?”  
  
He let out a tiny whimper, his head lolling back limply into my hand.  
  
“You’ll love it too,” I went on, eyes raking over his body.“Just look at you. Both your holes are just aching to be stuffed already. Aren’t they?”  
  
I held his gaze, waiting until he finally gave another weak nod. Returning the nod, I took his hands and placed them on the back of my neck. He followed my lead eagerly, moving them to clasp together around me.  
  
“Oh, I  _can_  call you Dean now...right?” I asked, smiling at him oh so sweetly as I smoothed my hands up his arms, then slid them down his back.  
  
He nodded, lips still sealed shut into a stubborn line. That is, until they split on a wide-eyed gasp when I slipped my hands underneath his ass, holding onto each perfectly rounded globe and hoisting him up, while spreading him as wide as the stiff fabric of his prim and proper trousers would allow.  
  
“Mmm, yes. I figure this would qualify us for first name basis. Wouldn’t you agree?”  
  
He made a pleased sound from above me, though in all fairness that may have had more to do with the way I slid his spread out ass against the bulge in my own pants—more than obvious, even through the somewhat thicker khaki fiber.  
  
“Mmm. I will take that as a yes, then.”  
  
I chuckled softly, working his pants open and shoved down and out-of-the-way, then doing the same with my own. Dean seemed only too happy to cooperate, letting his body be moved this way and that, his head dropping with a limp, heavy thump onto the top of mine when I wrapped my hand around both of us, shuddering and making the most deliciously slutty noises. After the first few stuttery up and down strokes, once I got a good, steady rhythm going, Dean started to move as well, pushing himself into my fist and making this wrecked noise at the top of each roll of his hips, only growing stronger, longer, with each one.  
  
“Dean.” I said, voice pitched low and dangerously calm. “ _Dean._  I want you to look at me.”  
  
He responded with a displeased whine, and rolled his forehead lazily against mine, like he was trying to burrow himself closer, or maybe even deeper into my skin. I stopped moving my hand, suspended in mid-stroke halfway up our shafts.  
  
“I said. Look at me.”  
  
He let out another whine, but then his hands slipped down to my shoulders, fisting the fabric of my shirt and then using the leverage to push himself back, his eyes blinking open, groggy, a moment later. I rewarded him with my sweetest smile, holding his gaze as I gave our cocks one last, lazy tug, swiping over both our slits.  
  
“That’s right,” I encouraged as I dragged my dripping thumb over his lips, first pushing, then pulling. “Now. Show me how you open up real good for me, baby.”  
  
He nuzzled into my touch, moaning somewhere deep in the back of his throat as he let the movement of my thumb guide his lips apart, giving me just enough room to dip two fingers inside. As if by reflex, his mouth instantly closed tightly around them, cheeks hollowing to suck my fingers deep inside. They easily slipped in all the way up to the knuckles. I groaned.   
  
“Mmm, that’s right. Such a good boy for me,” I whispered, arching up into him as I watched Dean’s mouth work to mirror the movement around my fingers.  
  
I took my fingers out of that eager mouth of his and dipped them into the shiny mess around his lips, before placing my hand on the small of his back, sliding it lower and lower until I knew that I was right there—knew by the violent shudder that  racked Dean’s body.  
  
“See, Dean. That’s the first mistake most people make.”  
  
I watched him closely as I circled a finger around his hole, gentle and teasing.  
  
“They think I really  _am_  as sweet n’ nice as I look.”  
  
His eyebrows barely had a half a second to furrow in confusion before I plunged that finger inside him all the way up to the knuckle, with one long, sharp movement.

And I knew how true those words were, knew there was nothing sweet or nice inside of me; because of the way his whole body jerked at the intrusion, the way the pain made his mouth form into the most perfect obscenely pink O as he yelped out in pain—well, I drank it all in, felt nothing but pleasure flood through every single part of me. I stayed still, let Dean just sit there on my finger, as I watched the pain carve itself deeper and deeper into those too-pretty features of his.  
  
But then, I started moving. Leaving my finger buried all the way in him just as it was, I moved it around inside, searching, searching, until  _there_. Yeah, right there. There was a harsh cry from Dean, and then only these raspy wheezy little breaths from that pretty pretty O of his gaping mouth, as I rubbed over that sweet spot inside him. It was too much pleasure, on top of the pain that he was still in; too soon, too hard and unrelenting to register as anything but more pain. I knew this, as much as I knew that I should probably stop.  
  
But that all seemed quite distant and theoretical now. I couldn’t do a thing other than just sit there and watch as I pushed harder, faster, felt his fingernails dig deeper and deeper into my shoulder as he forced himself to stay upright, to keep his eyes on me yet far away at the same time. And then his fingers turned into claws, somehow managing to break through the cotton fabric of my shirt and tear their arc of half-moon circles into my skin. His eyes went huge for a split second before his teeth bit down into his lower lip, chewing on it harder and harder as he worked to hold himself together, even though he looked like he was going to lose his precarious hold any moment now.  
  
I watched in a fascinated daze as the pleasure wrapped itself around the pain, for a moment making the pain that much worse before it tipped the scales. It was the moan that finally escaped his lips that announced—clear as a fucking bell—the the pain was now only an undercurrent to the pleasure; that it was now the pain that was ramping up the pleasure, and not the other way around. Dean’s eyes glazed over, and then fluttered shut a moment later.  
  
“Dean.”  
  
“Mmmmmfffff?” he replied oh so intelligently, eyes remaining firmly shut. I pressed in closer, so that my lips brushed against his when I spoke.  
  
“I do not recall giving you permission to look away from me.”  
  
He winced, and then let out a heavy sigh before dutifully dragging his eyes open. Holding his gaze, I watched as his eyes bulged wide a moment later, when I let my finger slip out of him, only to thrust right back in with two.  
  
“I suppose I can’t really blame you,” I started in a casual conversational tone, keeping our eyes locked and completely ignoring his reaction, even as I added a third finger and started up a callous, brutal rhythm.  
  
“I mean. I  _do_  put on a good act—and what with as many years as I’ve had to practice, it’s easy enough to buy it, I suppose.  Yeah, it’s easy to believe there’s nothing but good manners and boyish charm behind this big old grin...dimples and all.”  
  
I gave him my best choirboy grin to illustrate my point, even as I slammed my fingers into him that much more savagely.  
  
“Yeah, yeah.” I nodded sympathetically.  
  
“I get that. Really, I do.  _But._  Do you know why that is, Dean?” I asked, looking at him expectantly.  
  
And just like that, I stopped my fingers abruptly, watched his face closely as I felt his hands clench and unclench at the fabric of my shirt. He made some sort of sound that could be taken as a vaguely questioning type sound, and I so very graciously chose to do so, with a curt nod of my head.  
  
“Well since you did ask so nicely, I’ll tell you why,” I said, giving him a soft, encouraging smile and starting to pump in and out with my fingers once again, but this time it was slow, almost casual.  
  
“It’s the first thing I ever really learned, and it’s probably the most important lessons anyone  _could_  ever learn: we only see what we want to see. We look for things that will prove us right, and we will actually look away from things that will prove us wrong. It’s built into our biology just as much as the colors of our eyes or hair. So really, I understand how easy it is to buy my act. After all, it  _was_  constructed for just that purpose. But, that doesn’t change the fact that that’s really all it is.”  
  
I paused, hand closing around the cut of his hip to pin him in place as my fingers bottomed out inside of him.  
  
“An act.”  
  
His hips made a ghost of a stutter, more thoughtless reflex than any conscious movement, but I tightened my grip on him regardless, a warning as much as anything else.  
  
“ _Don’t,_ ” I growled.  
  
His eyes rounded for just a flicker of a second, lips parting but not quite daring to voice the question that danced around behind those eyes. My mouth twisted into a bitter, brittle little thing of a smile.  
  
“Don’t fool yourself into believing there’s something real there.”  
  
His mouth parted wider, as if to speak, but before he could form one word I ripped my fingers out of him, and the only thing his mouth seemed capable of producing was a pain-filled yelp just before all sound was choked right out of that perfect pretty mouth of his, when I set him right on top of me and shoved in with one sharp stroke.  
  
“See? Nothing there, Dean.”  
  
I spoke slowly, carefully, each word punctuated with another thrust.   
  
“Nothing but evil. And darkness. And emptiness. And you can look all you want, Dean, but you’ll never find anything you really, truly like.”  
  
I stopped, buried all the way inside him and keeping him there with only the loose grip of my hands resting at his hips. We watched each other carefully, the silence stretching thin between us, as still and tightly wrought as our bodies. And then, I felt  a tug. Tiny, really only just a whisper of a thing, but still an undeniably and insistent pulling on the fiber of my shirt. I searched Dean’s face for any type of clue, and there was nothing there, nothing but wide-open, unflinching ever-watchful eyes, even as he tentatively moved his hips in one slow, shallow grind.  
  
My hips snapped forward in response. And there, there it was—Dean’s teeth sinking into his lower lip, trying and completely failing in swallowing back a moan, all heat and need and really, bearing much too much resemblance to an honest to goodness growl. He seemed to snap himself out of it a moment later, blinking at me dazedly and then watching me nervously, as if he was trying to assess the damage, or maybe more like waiting to see what the damage would do—would make  _me_  do.  But then it was almost like he suddenly thought better of it, squaring his shoulders as if he was bracing himself for something.  
  
Then there was another tug, a faint smile twitching at the corners of his lips as he kept his eyes still dutifully locked on mine.

And that...that was it. It seemed to snap something deep inside me, breaking it apart with this animal roar that I should probably have been alarmed had issued forth from my mouth—but I was far too busy grabbing a good and bruising hold on Dean’s legs and then using it to pound Dean onto my cock with the most punishing, tooth-jarring force I could manage between the combination of my strength and his body weight.  
  
And it was good. So good. Every punched out breath that it forced out of him, every obscenely loud slap of our bodies crashing together. All of it. So good, each better than the last. After a while, Dean’s head fell bonelessly to rest on mine, foreheads pressing together with a heavy thud. But he kept his eyes open, kept them right on mine. And so did I. Kept staring right into those startlingly green eyes of his, those specks of gold seeming to almost crystallize and sharpen at this close proximity, even as everything beyond went blurry.  
  
I pushed our faces closer, the rhythm of my movement going heavy, each thrust growing more intense, more deliberate, more distinctly separate as the pauses in between each stretched longer and longer.  
  
“I’m a monster, Dean,” I mouthed against his lips as I bottomed out inside him, before continuing to hammer home the truth and danger behind my warning with each brutal snapping of our hips together.  
  
“A dark.”  
  
“Sick.”  
  
“Blood-thirsty.”  
  
“Monster.”  
  
“And pulling up the cover, and closing your eyes… it’s not gonna help you.”  
  
“It’s not gonna stop me.”  
  
He made a needy, high-pitched noise at that, hands clawing into my shirt as all his inner muscles began to tighten up around me. His eyes started to flutter closed then, but I wasn’t having any of that.  
  
No.  
  
I cupped the back of his head, burying my hand in his hair and giving it one ferocious, sharp yank backward. It pulled the sweetest little cry out of him, even as his eyes snapped open and refocused on me. I grinned up at him, right before I dipped down to lick a stripe from the hollow of his neck all the way up the column of his neck, ended with a quick, sharp kiss.  
  
Breaking off with a bruising bite to his lower lip, I kept up the warning tugs to his hair whenever his eyes began to drift away again, thrusting up into him so hard that the sounds of our bodies slapping together were obscene. But it only seemed to make his moans—breathy and choked back though they were—grow that much louder, and in turn made my own movements that much harder. Then there was this exhausted, shattered-sounding cry, and it startled me more a moment later when I realized it had come for my own lips.  _And why._  I wanted to break this man—wanted to see him tear from the inside out, wanted to see all those tightly held muscles of his give; wanted to see him shatter and taste his cries of pain when he did.  
  
There was something so very soft and fragile about him, something which he did his best to tuck away behind this hard, perfectly smooth shell that he presented to the world. And I. I wanted to find it and hold it and squeeze it till it bled. Because as it turns out, I  _was_  the monster of this story. And the sooner Dean learned to accept that—to never forget that—the better. I leaned in closer, our lips pressing together with every push into him.  
  
“Dean, Dean, Dean,” I chanted against his lips.  
  
He whined, struggling to keep his eyes focused on mine, and losing two inches for every one gained as he slipped closer and closer to the edge. My fingers tightened their hold on his hair roughly—too roughly; enough to make the roots of his hair go white momentarily, enough to fill his eyes with tears as they went wide with the force of it.  
  
“Dean, Dean, Dean.”  
  
But this time it was nothing more than a reprimand.  
  
“You should never close your eyes.”  
  
And with that, I gave one last shove and emptied into him, grinding up shakily with each wave of it. But all through it—even as his body jerked and trembled, even as his own come spurted messily between us—he did as I said, and never so much as blinked.


	6. Chapter 6

_Sometimes I like to pretend I’m alone. No one left act normal for. No need to hide who I really am. Not even from myself. It would be...freeing._

 

  


I didn’t really want to let myself think about where I was going.  _Or why._  
  
So I didn’t.  
  
Didn’t think about where I was driving, or what I planned on doing once I got there. Didn’t think about any of it. Not when I rushed out of the car, not when I pounded on the door; didn’t think about one single thing other than just letting my legs go wherever the hell they seemed so intent on getting. Until that door swung open, and he was finally standing there in front of me, that trademark starched-stiff oxford shirt of his all untucked and unbuttoned, revealing the pristine white ribbed fabric of the undershirt beneath it. And far too many of those goddamn freckles.  
  
My throat made this sound, like this horribly failed attempt at a choke that ended up dying only about halfway to getting there, and then just proceeded to crumple in on itself.  
  
And then. Then it was almost like I’d finally remembered to breathe. I was gulping it all in with one deep swallow—too quick, too much, my lungs constricting around the newly acquired supply of air as they tried recalling how to work again.  
  
Of course, that’s when it all hit me. All those things I hadn’t let myself think about in my numbed rush to get to  _here_ —well, they all came speeding at me, slammed square into me. I would have been concerned, made an attempt to cover for the way it  _had_  to be so obviously showing all over my face, burning through my eyes. But at the moment, I was entirely too busy with the rage roiling its way through me. Demanding blood, blood, more blood.  
  
Though whether it was his, or my own...I couldn’t really be too sure. Because I shouldn’t want to be here, certainly shouldn’t  _have_  to be here. I didn’t know what it was that had driven me to get here—to get to  _him_ —but somehow, that didn’t even seem all that important right now. No, much more troubling was the fact that it wasn’t so much that I  _couldn’t_  stop myself from coming here, but rather, that I hadn’t really wanted to even so much as  _try_  to stop myself.  
  
Gone was the calm, cool and collected Sam I’d prided myself on maintaining for so very long. The smart one, the one who thought with his head and not with the hunger, the one who cleaned up the messes left so carelessly behind by the cloying greedy claws of my monster. If nothing else, I had always  _always_  had this space to breathe in, that expanse of logical self-aware consciousness that separated me from my (sometimes-caged) beast.  
  
But now? Without that? I didn’t know  _what_  to think. Oh, I certainly knew what I  _wanted_  to think. It would be so very easy to tell myself it was the monster that was still driving...but not quite so easy to believe. Because it was me, all me, nothing but me—and yet, nothing  _like_  me, either.  
  
No, this Sam bore a striking resemblance to that beast within.  
  
 _And yet._  And yet, I couldn’t help but wonder. Had that always been the case? Had I always been—all of me, that is—a lot more like that crazy blood-thirsty monster of mine than I’d ever even thought? Than I’d ever even let  _myself_  see?  
  
Or was it simply a matter of prolonged exposure? That the thing had been riding along with me for so long, we’d actually started bleeding into each other, only a matter of time before Dr. Jekyll could no longer throw off Mr. Hyde?  
  
I didn’t know. Wasn’t sure I  _wanted_  to know.   
  
But I did know one thing. And that was, that  _he_  had done this to me. Of that, I was absolutely certain. And as I stood there staring at him, with only the threshold of his doorway separating us, I knew this one thing to be true down to the very marrow of my bones.  
  
He stared right back at me, his stupidly big eyes going all wide and round as he took me in. He gave a couple slow, dazed blinks, mouth falling open to form the most unfairly perfect pink O before he seemed to catch himself and hurry to press those obscenely pretty lips of his back together, Adam’s apple stretching at his skin as he swallowed hard.  
  
He let the door fall open wider without saying a word, his eyes remaining glued to mine as he stepped back to allow me just enough room to step inside. Not enough room, though, that I could get past him without brushing against him. But I supposed that was kind of the point. It was like he was giving in, but only the bare minimum.  
  
It was still plenty, though.  
  
For my part, I was more than happy to take it. Stalking in closer, into his space, I grabbed a handful of his shirt and tugged at it as I shoved my forearm under his chin, and pushed. He slammed into the wall behind him with a satisfying thud.  
  
Just like that, I was on him, kicking the door shut behind us and pressing in tight, close enough so that I could taste the way his breath hitched, swallow it down greedily. He trembled—honest to god  _trembled_ —underneath me, before he managed to remember to pull himself in and hide.  
  
I looked down at him, watching him lose control and then struggle to reach back for it and hold on tight, a dark smirk sneaking its way onto my lips before I could do much to stop it. Even if I’d wanted to. Not that I could really claim I had much motivation in that department, since it was pretty fucking obvious—even in that split second before he let his eyelids fluttered shut—that he was just as equally turned on as he was terrified.  
  
 _As well he should be._  
  
But even that delicious show of submission, only made that much sweeter for the way he still held himself so tightly wound—jaw muscles clenching convulsively, making it so very obvious that he was still teetering violently between relinquishing all power, and wishing he could do anything  _but_ , in fact hating the fact that his body seemed to give it up so easily—well, even all of that did absolutely nothing to appease the beast inside of me, demanding retribution.  
  
It should have. By all accounts, it really, really should have. Instead, it  only managed to make that itch under my skin about a thousand times more unbearable. I pressed him tight against the wall, grinding in hard and rough and deliciously brutal, the pain bleeding into the white-hot pleasure. There was no smoothness to it—it was all start and go; erratically speeding up and then stalling out into tiny little rutting barely-there movements.  
  
All through it, the words came rushing out of me, unbidden. Even to my own ears, my voice sounded as much terrified as it did threatening. Trouble was, I couldn’t really tell  _who_  the things I said were scaring more—him or me.  
  
“Fucking trouble’s what you are. Knew it the first time I fucking saw you.”  
  
The words kept flying out, punctuated only by harsh panted-out breaths and half bitten-back moans.  
  
“I mean,  _God_. I put everything in danger. Killing out in public...out in the fucking open where just anyone could walk on by and see. Just...to protect  _you_! And I didn’t—I don’t—even  _know_  you. And now—”  
  
I broke off, choosing to ignore the way my voice had gone all thin and brittle at the end there, in favor of burying my face into the dip of his collarbone. But my lips kept moving, mouthing my insane babblings into his skin.  
  
“Now I did it again. Didn’t even  _think_  about stopping myself. Or  _not_  doing it.  _‘Cause of you._ ”  
  
I snapped my hips into him with enough force to make the wall shake in protest. And then I stayed there just like that, hanging there for a moment with the both of us pressed flat against the wall as I grabbed onto his shoulders and used my hold to pull up, staring at that tendon of muscle that ran across his neck even as my lips brushed against it.  
  
“’Cause of you. All of it,” I went on.  
  
And on and on.  
  
“And now...now someone...someone named...Alastair...he’s supposed to be coming. Coming after  _me_. And—”  
  
I let my head drop once again, burying it into his neck in the hopes that it’d muffle out any further words—though it if it was for his benefit, or mine, I couldn’t really say for sure.  
  
“And everything is so fucked up...and...and...what’re we gonna  _do_?  _What are we gonna do._ ”  
  
I kept repeating it, chanting it into his skin and refusing to acknowledge or so much as think about exactly when I’d started making plans—looking at the world and the future—in terms of  _we_. Just focused on those words as the answer, any possibility of its existence, kept slipping more and more out of my grasp.  
  
 _Right out from between my goddamn fingers._  
  
It was like every thrust of my hips was actually physically pushing that answer away even further. But that only made me shove in harder and more desperate than ever, made those words come out even faster, until they seemed to run together into one great big black hole of a question mark, only growing bigger.  
  
That was when I felt it.  
  
His hand closed around the back of my head, squeezing tight around it for just a fraction of a second before he started stroking over it ever so gently.  _Caressing,_  really. It was soft and gentle and soothing, and everything I  _didn’t_  want right now. It actually hurt,  _physically hurt_. So much more than the bruising violent push and pull of our bodies against each other.  
  
And it pretty much ended me.  
  
A sob tore out of me—this pathetic ruined sounding thing. I only had about half a second to process the fact that the sound had in fact come out of me, before my hips gave one last violent jerk, and everything went hot and wet and so very blissfully still.

  


**::**

  


I should probably have been alarmed when I realized where I was—considering I had no memory of how I’d actually gotten here.  
  
Here, being what appeared to be Dean’s bedroom, sitting on what could only be his bed.  
  
I stole a quick glance at him, only to find him studiously concentrating on cleaning all the blood off of me.  
  
 _Again._  
  
Well, this seemed to be turning into quite the habit.  
  
And sitting here, having Dean’s hands all over me, the sensation of the warm cloth gently swiping over my skin—well, it all felt too damn good for me to do anything but sit back and enjoy.  
  
Enjoy not only the pure visceral pleasure of it, but also the fact that for the second time this week, within the span of just three nights, if we’re really counting, Dean had so very easily agreed to—even volunteered—to help me. To take care of me.  
  
 _Nurse Smith._  
  
I had to bite back a smile at the thought, since it was highly doubtful Dean would much like the sound of it. But still—didn’t mean I couldn’t let myself enjoy that particular image.  _Lots._  
  
I didn’t have the slightest clue how much time had passed, when the sound of him clearing his throat finally startled me back to reality.  
  
My head shot up automatically, earning a curious quirked brow from Dean.  
  
“So...” he ventured a moment later. “You wanna tell me who the hell this  _Alastair_  is?”  
  
My eyes drifted over to his uneasily. We held each other’s gaze for a long moment, before I finally looked away again with a heavy sigh.  
  
“I’ve been wondering the same damn thing,” I admitted miserably.  
  
I offered him a hopeful little smile, but it quickly unraveled around its already strained edges at the look on his face, a look that made it oh so very clear that answer wasn’t gonna quite do it for him.  
  
My whole body deflated in on itself on a defeated sound that was the bastard child of a groan and whine.  
  
“Okay. When I was leaving work tonight, there was this girl. And...well...by the time I got to her, it was already too late. The dude she got—he was dead. By the looks of him, he’d actually been that way for a while. But...but right before I was about to finish her off, she whispered something about  _‘Alastair’s already on his way’_. And...and that he’s not gonna be real happy when he gets here, either.”  
  
He gave me a look that said  _what the hell is that supposed to mean_ , and all I could do was match it in return.  
  
“Yeah, I dunno man,” I added with a shrug. “But...she said she was there because of  _me_. Because of what I’d been doing. That...that she came there— _here_ —because so many of their  _‘friends’_  from this  _‘neck of the woods’_  had been going missing lately.”  
  
I braved another quick peek at him, and let out a little nervous laugh at the expression on his face.  
  
“Dude, I know! It doesn’t even make any sense! But…”  
  
“But?”  
  
“Well...I mean, at first, I was gonna chock it up to it just being the crazy ravings of a dying bitch, right? I mean, people  _do_  tend to say some pretty fucked up shit in those last desperate breaths, when they know, without a doubt, that they’re about to die. So. I was just gonna leave it at that, y'know?”  
  
“And now?”  
  
I groaned, digging the heels of my hands as far into my eyes as they would go.  
  
“It’s just—” I stopped myself again, thought about it for a moment. “It was just really, really weird, okay?”  
  
I looked at him pleadingly, before letting my head drop into my hands with a frustrated huff. Mostly because I really didn’t know what it was exactly I was even begging him for. My mind raced and stumbled over how exactly to describe the scene I’d witnessed earlier tonight, to explain what it was about it that somehow didn’t sit quite right.  
  
“Well okay for one? Her victim—he had his throat slashed. Like, as in right clean across it. Very clean. Like—as in  _way too_   _practiced_  clean.”  
  
I watched him for a moment, letting that sink in.  
  
“Oh, and then there  _was_  the bowel that was filled with what had to be his blood,” I added casually, as if it was no more than an afterthought.  
  
Dean’s eyes bugged out at that, but he held himself otherwise still and didn’t seem like he was planning on saying anything else any time soon.  
  
“I dunno, man,” I added, shaking my head. “It just somehow all had this really fucked up devil-worshiping-voodoo-cult type of vibe to it...y’know?”  
  
“Yeah, no. I could see that....yeah,” he stammered out in a stunning display of eloquence, nodding his head vigorously.  
  
“Oh...and there  _was_  also her blood.”  
  
“Her blood?” he repeated, voice no more than a choked out breath.  
  
“Yeah,” I nodded. “It’s definitely different. Like...I dunno. More intense. Yeah, way more intense. And more...I dunno. Just  _more_.”  
  
“Huh.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
And really, there was nothing else to say. Or nothing good, anyways. The silence that followed was as good a confirmation as that of any actual words he could have come up with. After a while, he cleared his throat, the dry awkward sound of it slicing heavily through the quiet. He bowed his head, hand going to scrub at some phantom itch at the back of his neck, before he seemed to force himself to pull his gaze back up to mine.  
  
“Well, maybe she was just...like some overzealous Wiccan type? That uh...that just went a little nutso?”  
  
His voice held as much hope as his wobbly little smile did, a brittle, fragile thing that was waiting on reassurance as much as it was an attempt to give it. I snorted, shaking my head as I looked away.  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, maybe.”  
  
I could not remember the last time that I wanted so very badly to convince another person that I was normal, that the  _world_  was normal. That everything was all bright sunshine and blue skies, not one single cloud on the horizon, and that there wasn’t even a chance of one ever rolling in. To pretend that everything was a okay, and that it would stay that way. And more than anything, to be so desperate for them to believe it all.  
  
But pretending was exhausting. After all, I should know. I’d only been doing it my entire life.  
  
The realization that not having to pretend—even for just a short, short while—had been such a respite, had felt like such a damn relief? Well that—that terrified me more than anything else.


	7. Chapter 7

_I’ve always been good at compartmentalizing._   
  
_Hey, even a child in kindergarten knows that if you color outside the lines, all you’ll ever end up with is a big old mess._

_~~~_

 

There was a reason I made it a point to never mix business with pleasure.

And this right here—this was exactly it.

I did my very best to push those thoughts aside, to wipe my mind as blank as my face, as I surveyed the scene in front of me, so that I would look just like any other Sandover employee; interested, but not too interested, surprise mixed with a plausible dose of curiosity as to what exactly could have brought what looked to be the entire town’s police force into our offices on this fine morning. In other words, to look freaked out, but not because of any suspicious or incriminating reasons.

I was doing real well too...right up until my eyes landed on Dean Smith.

He stared at me, unblinking, and even from across the room I could see the tension written into every single line of his face and body; could practically feel myself drowning in the terror that filled those startlingly green eyes of his. I was rooted to the spot, suddenly forgetting how to work the limbs that were attached to my own body, just watching him watching me, until he seemed to pull himself up on a sharply indrawn breath, before proceeding to turn on his heel and stalk away.

I was still watching his form retreat down the hallway, when my view was suddenly blocked. When my eyes refocused enough to take in the yellow lettering against navy blue that spelled FBI, I did the only thing I could; smiled wide and bright and helpful as can be, and greeted the agent that stood in front of me without so much as a hint in my voice that my world was crumbling all around me.

  
**::**

**  
**

It was hard to keep the grin off my face (not to mention the damn  _bounce_  from my step) on my way back to my desk. Because it had been easy,  _all too easy_ , to convince Special Agent Victor Henriksen that I was as clueless as the rest of the concerned, conscientious employees of Sandover. In fact, if anything, I’d say the cops  _themselves_  were even more clueless than my fellow employees—seeing as the good agent had barely given me much more than the briefest of glances as he’d rattled out all his default questions.

Now all that was left to be done was to make it through the day without looking like the kid who’d gotten his grubby little hands into the cookie jar and  _didn’t_  get caught—and eaten all the cookies, too.

The ringing of the phone startled me back to reality. I stared at the offending contraption for a moment, before snapping into action. Better off being distracted by an idiot than sitting around with nothing but space and time for my thoughts to spin around in, I told myself. And so I cracked my knuckles out in front of me, sprawled back into my chair (as much as the space would allow, anyways), and watched Nosferatu bob his head enthusiastically at me as I hit the button to take the call.

I’d barely even gotten out my company-mandated greeting, when a familiar voice growled out at me from the other end.

“I need to see you in my office. Now.”

My mouth dropped open for a split second, then tipped lazily into a dark leer.

“Oh. Right away,  _Mr. Smith_.”

The only reply I got was the none-too-gentle click of the phone being slammed down on the other end.

_Before I could even finish my damn sentence._

I glared at the call log on my screen for a moment. After a while, I let out a heavy sigh, slipping my headset off and setting it down carefully on the desk. Ever so calmly, I rose to my feet, smoothing down my hair and fussing at my name tag until it lay just right, before grabbing for my bag and heading towards the elevators.

  
**::**

  
Upstairs, it became clear pretty damn quickly that Smith had worked himself into quite the little tizzy. Actually, it was hard  _not_  to see it the instant I’d stepped into his office, and the little tell-tale click of the door sliding shut behind me had Dean’s head shooting up to look over at me; it was written all over his face.

I would’ve gladly offered reassurance, if watching him squirm wasn’t quite so...enjoyable. So instead, I merely threw him a polite all-business smile, completely ignoring the question hanging so very thickly in the air as I stepped forward and busied myself with getting comfortable in the chair that faced his desk. After setting my stuff down and crossing my legs leisurely, I finally looked over at him again, finding that he was still perched over his desk.

 _Looming, actually_.

I gave him my best schoolboy grin, flashing dimples. It only made his scowl deepen dangerously, eyebrows practically meeting in the middle to form one adorably pissed-off line. The delicate curve of those perfectly manicured brows of his kind of ruined the effect he was going for.

I just stared right back at him, forcing my smile even wider as I waited him out.

At long  _long_  last, he broke.

“So...?” he demanded with an impressive arch of his eyebrow.

“So...” I shot back oh so casually.

And he looked so utterly perplexed by that non-answer, it made him positively wobbly for a second there.

Which made it pretty much impossible to keep the amusement off my face, or out of my voice for that matter, as I leaned back in my chair, folded my arms over my chest, and asked, “What uh. What seems to be the problem this time... _Mr. Smith?_ ”

“The-the problem?” He stammered with dazed confusion, exasperation rapidly seeping in. “The problem!?”

When my only response was to quirk a questioning eyebrow at him in return, all clueless befuddlement, he huffed out an exasperated sound. It was quickly followed up with an eye roll as he threw his hands up in the air dramatically.

“The problem—” he growled, leaning across the desk and pitching his body as close to me as it would go. “—is the oh, I dunno, lemme see....I’d say about a hundred or so cops that are camped out downstairs right now. And sniffing around that body that  _you_  left behind last night! You know, in your hasty retreat from that  _crime scene_!”

“ _I_  didn’t leave it behind,” I pointed out in my most patient voice.

But it only caused Dean to look at me like I had just grown a set of my very own horns, and that they were presently sprouting right through the top of my head.

I gave him another placating smile.

“That was the girl’s kill.  _She_  left that body behind,” I explained.

“Yeah, well. Same difference...at this point, anyways.”

“Yeah? And how d’you figure that?”

I hadn’t even realized that I’d leaned forward menacingly to ask the question, at least not until I registered the way he cowered back. It was just a tiny flinch of a movement before he caught himself and stilled, holding his ground.

“Uh. Well that still leaves us with a dead body,” he snarled through curled lips.

“That was found at a goddamn  _crime scene_. A crime scene that’s gotta have  _your_  fingerprints  _all_   _over it._ ”

“I never touched him.” I answered calmly, forcing myself to relax back into the chair.

“You—I’m sorry, what?!” he spluttered.

“I never once came even close to touching him. Or touching anything near him.” I clarified with an unconcerned shrug.

“I only touched the girl. And she’s....well, let’s just say no one’s gonna be getting any fingerprints off of her any time soon.”

He stared at me for a moment, eyes going big and round, mouth going slack. He shook his head to clear it.

“Well that’s—something, anyways. I guess. But whatever. Doesn’t really matter much. I’m sure they’re not gonna just dust for fingerprints right around the corpse. It’s the FBI, dude! The F B I” he enunciated deliberately, leaving a dramatic pause between each letter, as if it was its own word. 

“I’m sure they’ll be dusting every single inch of that entire place! If they haven’t already! And—”

“And?” I cut him off.

We glared at each other for a moment, before I dismissed it all with a wave of my hand.

“Dude, I work here!  _Of course_  my prints would be in there somewhere...along with about every other employee that parked on that level at some point over the past month or so.”

He fell back into his plush executive chair with a soft whooshing of leather pushing out air, and took some time to think it over. His face actually went through the most adorable series of scowls, brows knitting and then smoothing out as he visibly worked out argument and counterargument inside his own head.  At last, his eyes snapped over to mine. He leaned forward, hands curling around the edge of the desk, fingers tapping over it restlessly.

“You’re forgetting something. There’s cameras,” he whispered underneath his breath, giving me one last pointed look before his eyes started darting around the room suspiciously. He leaned in even closer, voice dropping to a barely audible husk. “ _Everywhere.”_

He gave the room one last furtive scan, then leaned back in his chair as turned the full force of his glare back on me.

“And once those agents get through watching whatever it is that all those cameras recorded...you know what they’ll see? They’ll see  _you_. Driving out of here. Last night.”

“Dean—” I warned.

“And then—”

His eyes widened so much right then, they looked like they might actually be in danger of popping right out.

“Oh god, and then—”

“Dean!”

I slammed my hand on the table, the sound of it resounding all too loudly in the air. It did its job nicely though, startling Dean into an abrupt halt, terror-filled eyes snapping onto mine and grabbing on for dear life, the sound of his heavy pants filling the silence between us, harsh and ragged as he struggled to catch his breath.  
  
I offered him a saccharine-sweet smile, before rising to my feet and leaning across the desk.  
  
“Not that I don’t appreciate it. Really,” I held my palm to my chest in an exaggerated gesture. “I’m  _truly_  touched by your concern. Plus, I must say…freaked-the-fuck-out  _is_  a good look on you. Really brings out all those adorable freckles of yours.”  
  
Reaching out and running a finger along his cheek, I traced along said freckles. Just to illustrate my point. He jerked his head away from my touch and stepped back beyond my reach, glaring at me as soon as he was at a safe distance.

“Well. As enjoyable as all this is…” I motioned with my hand to indicate the space between us. “I assure you, there’s nothing for you to fret that pretty little head of yours about.”

He gave me an appraising look—complete with a suitably unconvinced tilt of his head—before stepping forward to flatten his palms on either side of me where I was perched on his desk, leaning down into my space.

“Yeah?” he snarled. “And how  _exactly_  do you figure  _that_?”

He leaned in even closer, so close that our foreheads were practically fused together, so close that I could feel his labored breaths fall against my own lips, so close that everything became a blur except the dangerous glint in his eyes, causing those gold flecks to stand out even more than usual, making them look too damn pretty, but also so very predatory at the same time. Somehow though, the overall effect ended up being just incredibly vulnerable.

“Wow. You’re  _really_  worried.” I murmured, ignoring the way that my voice seemed to have gone all soft and squishy with awe, among other things I chose to not catalog too definitively at the moment.

He didn’t answer me, didn’t so much as flinch. Just continued staring me down.

“Huh.”

“ _Huh_?” he hissed. “Shut up. There’s no  _huh_.”

I snickered. “Oh, but there is. There  _so_  is.”

I simply had to laugh even harder at the incensed look  _that_  brought to his face.

“I think the real question here is,” I said thoughtfully. “Why exactly is it that  _you_  are so concerned over this?”

He made a supremely unamused sound.

“Just how long do you think it’s gonna take them to connect the dots?” he sneered.

He rolled his eyes in irritation at the dubious look that was currently in residence on my own face.

“Till they connect you and me!” he tacked on.

He took a few deep breaths, like he was trying to calm himself. When he spoke again, it was in a voice that sounded like it was trying its very best to be patient, more so than actually managing to pull it off with any degree of success.

“What if they decide to go back a few weeks, see what was happening on those cameras during all of that time?”

“Yeah,” I shrugged nonchalantly. “What if...?”

He looked like he was in serious danger of popping a capillary, which probably wasn’t being helped much by the complete lack of alarm on my own face.

“You know....that night a few weeks back? When—” he cleared his throat, swallowing awkwardly as he lowered his eyes and continued in a voice that was just above a whisper. “When you uh...drove me home?”

“Uh huh,” I said, drawing out the last syllable into a question. 

His eyes shot back up to mine, practically burning now with the barely contained rage there.

“You don’t think that’s just a tiny bit suspicious? You and me. Driving out of here. Together.”

I gave him another shrug.

“Uh, no. Not really.”

He scoffed, mouth flying open to retort, but I stopped him with a raised hand.

“C’mon, Dean. You honestly think no other co-workers here ever go out for a drink? Blow off some steam after a long hard day at the office?”

“Well, no. But—“

“At worst, they might think that we’ve got a little thing going on the side. Now, maybe that’s against office policy—but last time I checked, that sure as hell wasn’t illegal. Definitely doesn’t make us suspects in  _murder_.”

“No. But having blood all over yourself in clear sight of a camera just might,” he bit back sullenly.

“Oh, you think two seconds of driving past a camera would really catch that? When most of my face was hidden in shadows, not to mention the little sun shade visor thing I had pulled down?” I laughed derisively, shaking my head.

“Oh c’mon, Dean. Do you really think I’ve managed to avoid getting caught all these years, doing what I do, by making rookie mistakes like that?”

I pretended not to notice how shell-shocked that appeared to make him, how he was looking at me now like he’d suddenly been reminded of the monster lurking in my shadows. So instead, I plastered on my best cocky smirk.

“Honestly, Dean. You’re giving the cops far too much credit here, and me far too little. You keep going like this, and I’m gonna  _have_  to take it personally....”

He swallowed audibly, eyes reflexively going wide with it. Tipping my head back, I eyed him curiously as I made an exaggerated cooing sound and pushed in closer.

“It’s cute, really.”

I nodded to emphasize my point, only smiling in encouragement at the resulting scowl that it earned me.

“But seriously, Dean. Don’t worry—I passed my little interview with flying colors. Agent Henriksen something or other questioned me, and  _trust_  me, he was more than happy to cross my name off that long, long list of his. Bet he doesn’t even remember my name by now, much less suspect a damn thing.”

I straightened up a little, but still stayed close, watched him even more closely. He looked mostly convinced, even if it did seem a bit wobbly around the edges.

“Now. We good then? Or am I gonna need to make you breathe into some paper bag before you manage to pull your shit together? I hope  _you_  remembered to pack your lunch today, sweetheart. ‘Cause I sure didn’t.”

He opened his mouth, closed it right back up and gave his head a firm shake before opening his mouth again to make another attempt. Still, though, nothing came out. After another moment passed, he just settled for nodding to convey his assent.

“Thataboy,” I purred approvingly, reaching up to smooth out the collar of his shirt.

“Now,” I said after a moment. “Why don’t you tell me how I may service you today,  _Sir_?”

He choked on air, coughing wildly for a moment before he managed to recover and offer up a quirked brow, that somehow pulled off questioning and knowing all at once. I responded with my best look of innocent confusion.

“You did call...for  _service,_ didn’t you?”

And I couldn’t keep from chuckling darkly at the sight of understanding slowly—and rather reluctantly—edging its way onto his face. I leaned in conspiratorially, relishing the way he automatically leaned into it as well, probably not even aware that he was doing it.

“’Cause you know what would look real suspicious, Dean? Is if I go back downstairs too soon. Might look like I didn’t actually take care of whatever problem it was that you called me up here for. Hell, some people might even get to thinkin’ I had no reason to be up here to begin with—nothing  _work_  related, anyways.”

 “Oh,” he breathed out, collapsing back into his chair dejectedly. “Yeah, yeah.”

“Mmm. We wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

He huffed out a humorless laugh.

“Yeah, no. No, we most definitely wouldn’t.”

I let him chew on that for a minute, watching out of the corner of my eye as he started to drum those perfectly manicured fingers of his against the desk, the frown only cutting a deeper groove between his brows as the seconds ticked by.

Eventually, I cleared my throat. His eyes snapped to mine obediently, and I gave him a small smile of approval smile for that.

“So...?” I asked.

“So...” he parroted right back, gaze slinking away to look at his computer screen, frantically scanning over its contents as if he might somehow find the answer there. He mumbled something incoherent, even as he reached for the mouse and started aimlessly clicking through the open windows on his desktop. And okay, wow. He was either going for some world title in multi-tasking, or—I shook my head to clear it and get back on track.

“So. You said something about your computer screen going black all of a sudden...correct?”

He froze, looking over at me blankly for a long moment, until something seemed to magically click somewhere behind his eyes, and his entire face visibly softened, lips curving into a sheepish little grin.

“Yeah,” he nodded enthusiastically, only too eager to jump on it. “Yeah, that’s right.”

After a few seconds, he shot up in his seat and reached over to press the power button on the screen. He hurriedly returned to his previous slumped position in the chair as if he hadn’t ever moved in the first place, and beamed up at me proudly. I smirked right back at him, sliding off the desk and prowling around to his side.

“Mind scooting back for me,  _Sir_?”

He looked up at me with a questioning, if somewhat amused, raised brow. I used my foot to give his chair a light nudge.

“Yeah. So I can take a look...?”

I jerked my thumb in the general area underneath his desk that I needed access to. He raised his hands up in a placating gesture and rolled his chair back to make some room for me. His eyes were practically gleaming as he watched me lower myself to my knees in the small space between his feet and the edge of the desk, and I found myself having to bite back an extremely unprofessional sound.

Because there was anticipation there. Sure. Promises, even. But what definitely  _wasn’t_  there, was anything even remotely related to work.

Kneeling there, I allowed myself a few minutes to take in the way he held himself stock still behind me, his knees so torturously close to touching me that I could feel the gravitational pull of his body heat, the way it made the air so much thicker, denser between us. And the way that he seemed to hold so very tightly to the steady rhythm of his breathing. Too steady. That’s what gave it away.

And that’s also what made every single inhale and exhale that followed that much more delicious. And more tempting.

Oh, how I wanted to break that rhythm, break him. And pin him to a place where he had no choice but to face the fact that it was  _me_  that had done this to him. And then have him beg for me to do it again. And again and again.

So I went to work. Dropped onto all fours and took my time— _made a show—_ of bending low. Low enough so I could fit myself underneath the desk, the inflexible fabric of my khakis tightening around my backside in its upturned position. I wasn’t entirely sure that it would have been any more obscene if I’d actually  _not_  had any pants on.

_Apparently, Mr. Smith agreed._

The choked stutter of his breath was like having my birthday and Christmas all rolled into one—if I were to actually celebrate or even care about such mundane human holidays, no more than anemically disguised feasts of emotional blackmail as they were.

But I digress. And right now, I had far more important things to focus on. I looked at Dean over my shoulder, giving him a lecherous wink before turning back to my work and crawling the rest of the way to the bundle of cords underneath the desk. I made quick work of following the wires to locate their sources, and from there the rest was all too easy. The rest being one tiny tug on the power cord, that is.

Twisting myself around, I poked my head out to meet Dean’s eyes, pretending not to notice—or enjoy—the glazed-over out of focus quality they held.

“Looks like the wiring must’ve got tripped down here somehow,” I informed him brightly.

“ _Huh_ ,” he deadpanned. “How in the world could I have ever been so careless?”

“Well...” I gave a one-shouldered shrug. “No use beatin’ yourself up over it.”

He snickered.

“No, I suppose not. So...you think that’s it then?” he asked, motioning with his head in the vague direction of said tripped wires behind me.

“Mmmhmm,” I nodded solemnly.

I hummed, as if deep in thought, and raised my hand to rest it just above his knee...which so very conveniently happened to be just about two inches from my face. His entire leg jolted as soon as I’d made contact, but he didn’t seem to be making any further move at closing his widely—really, pornographically—splayed legs. So I counted it as a win, and let my hand inch its way higher up his thigh, stopping at its widest point and letting it loosely curl around it there. I tapped a finger against it, tilting my head to the side as I smoothed out my tone to hit the buckets-of-sunshine customer service voice just right.

“Have you tried turning it back on,  _Sir_?”

Dean’s white knuckle grip on the arm rests went even whiter, looking fit to burst right through the skin. He swallowed thickly, throat working convulsively for a long moment before he finally shook his head no. I flicked my eyes down to take in the more than obvious bulge tenting at his pants, then dragged my gaze back up to his, all slow and dirty, just like the smile that was currently spreading across my face.

“You know, I could take care of that for you,” I offered, oh so very charitably. “I mean...since I’m already down here n’ all.”

His cock gave an eager twitch, and that was all the answer I really needed.

Oh, but sometimes I  _did_  love my job.


	8. Chapter 8

~ Interlude ~

  


The angel stood hidden in the shadows, taking in the now-abandoned scene. The yellow police tape formed a macabre frame around a patch of the garage’s concrete floor that had been painted with an unholy amount of blood. He could only imagine what had transpired here a few hours ago. Although, to be fair, he could probably imagine it a whole lot better than any of the poor, clueless humans assigned to solve this case.  
  
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, when he suddenly felt a pair of eyes on his back.  It was more than enough, he supposed. Yet still, he refused to turn around, instead choosing to keep his gaze obstinately fixed on the scene in front of him.  
  
She was the first to break the silence, and did so with a tired sigh.  
  
“You knew you wouldn’t be able to keep the two of them from discovering each other—not once they both started working here.  _Under the same roof._ ”   
  
“Yes, well...it wasn’t like I could really do much at that point, now could I?” he retorted, voice low and tight, tasting bitter in his own throat as he kept his eyes set dead ahead.  
  
Her derisive huff of a laugh floated over to him. It felt like a thousand tiny cuts across every inch of his vessels’ skin, a cloak of sharp stinging pain wrapped so very tight around him that it was choking him, pinning him in place so that he could hardly move, hardly even breathe. But she was either unaware or simply chose to disregard it, instead going on to dig all those knives in even deeper.  
  
“Oh, you mean it wasn’t like you could really do much... _without revealing yourself as an angel?_ ”  
  
His head whipped back to glare at her over his shoulder. But she ignored the dangerous glint behind those ice-blue eyes of his, and smiled at him softly.  Triumphantly. Like she knew she’d won the argument, but was being generous enough to allow him the space to get used to it, accept it.  
  
He turned his back on her, setting his jaw determinedly.  
  
“It doesn’t really change anything in the long run, Anna,” he informed her in a cool, clipped tone. “The best—and  _only_ —course remains the same. To stay close and watch, until...”  
  
“Until what?” she prompted him, after the silence had stretched too long, making it clear he had no intention of finishing that last sentence.   
  
The only answer she received was an almost imperceptible shrug. Followed by yet more silence.  
  
“So you’re okay with watching him drink blood?” she pressed on mercilessly. “With just hanging around and waiting to see if whoever it is that was called here last night, if they show up? If they find Sam—find both of them? You’re completely fine with sitting back and waiting to see what this  _demon_  will do to  _your charges_  once they are discovered, like shiny little presents?”  
  
She laughed, a bitter sounding thing, the harsh edges of it going all thin and brittle, making it snap off unevenly.  
  
“Wow. Might as well wrap a nice big bow around them...considering how utterly clueless and defenseless they are right now.”  
  
“ _Right now_ ,” he snapped back, words enunciated entirely too carefully. “The best thing I can do for them is precisely what I’ve  _been_  doing all along—stay close and watch. I may not exactly like the things I end up seeing very much...but at least I can keep him safe.”  
  
He silenced her sound of outraged disbelief with a warning look. She obeyed, but didn’t make much of an effort to disguise it from her face. He gave a brief nod, appeased.  
  
“Yes, well—” he added, his wings making a whisper of a fluttering sound with the movement of his shoulders into a faint shrug of resignation. “—alive anyways.”  
  
Both angels’ turned their eyes towards the blood-stained scene before them.  
  
They didn’t speak another word, just stood there and took in the way the rust-red of the dried-up blood blotched against the endless grey of the concrete structure. And they remained just like that, until all light—man-made though it was—had died away, and it all dissolved into an indistinguishable mass of blackness.


	9. Chapter 9

_Sometimes you bury a part of yourself so deeply that you have to be reminded it's there at all. Sometimes you just want to forget who you are, altogether._

_But the problem with fumbling around with your eyes closed is that you get used to the darkness all too easily. And when you finally do open them again, you’re gonna get blinded._   
  
_~~~_

  
  


I didn’t exactly remember when (not to mention how) it had become a habit. Just that one day, a few weeks after the fact, I’d suddenly realized that it was, indeed, a habit.  
  
As ingrained a part of my kill ritual as my trusted Zippo.  
  
I couldn’t even say that I was conscious of navigating my car towards Dean’s place after disposing of the bodies, only that every single time, it just seemed to be where I ended up. In fact, heading over there was all pretty much a semi-conscious blur. Mostly, it just seemed that in one breath, the ash-laden smoke was stinging at my nostrils and the back of my throat, and when I exhaled next, I was standing in front of Dean Smith’s door.  
  
His eyes would always widen—just that little bit—when he took the sight of me in, breath oh so predictably hitching no matter how hard his teeth sunk into his lower lip to silence the ragged choked off sound. And then he’d move aside, door falling open just enough for me to squeeze my way in.  
  
I wasn’t really certain why he let me in, why he  _kept_  letting me in.  
  
But he did.  
  
So I pushed my way into his home, and into him. It was always,  _always_ , right there; against the wall, hard and fast and fucking brutal.  
  
And he let me.  
  
He just kept letting me.  
  
Hell, he begged for it, begged so prettily and loudly and downright  _sluttily_ , that I actually had to cover his mouth. And the way he licked and panted and screamed into my palm, like this was actually what he’d wanted all along but just hadn’t known how to ask for it—well, it made me completely fucking lose it.  
  
Every single time.  
  
And every single time, he’d slide off of me when it was over. Without a word, without so much as another look, he’d disappear down the hallway, and I’d just follow him, sit on his bed and close my eyes while I waited for him to come back with that white towel and that bowl of steaming hot water.  
  
Each time, no matter how much I knew it was coming, the warm, whisper-gentle touch of the cloth would make me wince.  
  
Each time, I would watch him without even attempting to disguise the fact that I was doing it.  
  
And every single goddamn time, he’d pretend that he wasn’t noticing, couldn’t feel my eyes all over him, as he would just go on to slowly, meticulously clean the dried blood off of me, first from my face, then from my hands, before turning his attention to wiping off the come—both his and mine—from the rest of my body.  
  
I suppose it really  _was_  true what they said then: the only thing it takes to develop a habit, is to  _make_  it a habit...do something often enough and it just sort of becomes what you do.

  


**::**

  


Tonight though, as I sat there and watched him start to work on my face, I couldn’t stop from thinking about how this had become such a routine— _for the both of us_. If I was any other person, a normal person, that did normal people things, felt the way normal people (that I’ve observed anyway) tended to feel about such things...well then, I would probably classify what Dean and I were doing as a relationship.  
  
While I couldn’t give him that—mostly because I couldn’t give  _myself_  that—I still couldn’t help but think about it. And then think about it some more. Perhaps most of all, what kept nagging at me, was that I just knew this was not how normal people did the whole ‘post-coital’ thing. In fact, I suddenly found myself having to suppress a hysterical little giggle at just how  _not_  normal this was.  
  
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t at least try to make it as normal as possible, I told myself. Blood and corpse ash notwithstanding, that is.  
  
“So uh.” I cleared my throat awkwardly, gathering myself before finally looking up to meet his gaze with a nervous little smile. “So how  _did_  you end up as Mr. Director of Sales & Marketing at Sandover anyways?”  
  
We stared at each other silently for one breathless moment, before I quickly rushed to amend my question.  
  
“If, uh. You don’t mind me askin’, I mean.”  
  
Dean laughed.  
  
“What?” I asked.  
  
The smile on my own lips grew strained, as one’s tends to be when he feels like he’s somehow missed the joke. I could still see the laughter twinkling in his eyes, when he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.  
  
“Oh. So we’re doing this now, huh?”  
  
I could see that he was trying to keep a straight face at the expression of confusion on my own. He studiously avoided looking at me though, instead opting to keep his eyes on his own hand, and the blood that he was currently cleaning off my cheek. After a while, he blew out a long breath.  
  
“Uh. Okay let’s see...well, I went to Stanford for my business degree.”   
  
“Stanford, huh?” I whistled. “Wow. Guess Mommy and Daddy must’ve been  _real_  proud then, hmm?”  
  
Much to my surprise, those words caused a noticeable cloud to pass over Dean’s features.  
  
“Yeah, I guess,” He finally responded after a long pause, and shrugged at the un-worded question in my eyes.  
  
“That’s a… _relative_  term— _Mommy and Daddy_.” He let out a quick, hard laugh. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith—they  _were_  very proud. ‘Bout as proud as any adoptive parents  _could_  be, I suppose.”  
  
The last words were muffled, mumbled as they were into his neck after he’d turned his back on me to rewet the cloth. They were quiet enough that I couldn’t be quite positive if I’d actually heard right. Even so, I couldn’t stop the much too loud gasp that escaped my lips, which caused his head to whip right back towards me.  
  
“You—” I swallowed hard, stared even harder. “You were  _adopted?_ ”  
  
He considered me for a moment, then gave a quick nod before turning back to his task, wringing the excess water out of the rag.  
  
“Mmmhmm.”  
  
I studied him, trying to convince myself to leave it at that. But in the end, curiosity got the best of me. Or stupidity. I suppose it depended on your viewpoint.  
  
“Do you remember anything from before?“ I half-whispered.  
  
He looked at me, brows knit in confusion.  
  
“ _Before_?”  
  
“Uh. Yeah.  _Before._  Y’know, as in before you were adopted?”  
  
His narrowed his eyes at me. Then he just stood there, studying me without even trying to disguise the fact that he was doing so, as if he truly believed that he could somehow find whatever it was he was looking for if he just looked hard enough, long enough.  
  
My mouth automatically turned up into that smile I had grown so accustomed to using whenever I had to convince the world that I was human just like them. But I froze midway, the smile faltering, feeling too tight, too bright; too much and not enough at the same time. Because it felt useless...and because it was obvious that he could see right through it. Finally, he jutted his chin out, those all-seeing eyes boring into me.  
  
“Why do you ask?”  
  
I shrugged, eyes darting away.  
  
“It’s just...” I stole a brief glance at him, before looking away again. “I was adopted, too. But I was just a baby...six months, or something like that. So I don’t really remember anything at all. From  _before_.”  
  
I raised my eyes to his, hopeful, and smiled softly.  
  
“I guess...I guess I’m just curious s’all,” I rushed to add.  
  
He appeared to be considering it for a moment, then considering  _me_. Finally, he gave a sharp nod, seemingly as much to himself as to me, before returning his attention to the task of cleaning up my face as he began his tale.  
  
“I really don’t remember all  _that_  much. Bits and pieces. More flashes of images than really the whole story. Or, the actual events, or whatever. I definitely remember that last night. But before that, I remember it was me and mom and dad, and also my little brother. Dad....dad’s kina fuzzy. But mom....mom was really, really beautiful, with this long, long, blonde hair. With like, these soft waves.   
  
Like a halo. And these big blue eyes. But see, there was always something really sad about her. Like, not that she was crying all the time or anything like that. Just....like she was always somewhere else, somewhere far away. Like, the kind of distance that's measured by years, not miles, y'know?  Or...I dunno. Maybe it was more just... resigned. Or something.”  
  
He paused, taking in a breath that made his shoulders visibly rise and fall.   
  
“But somehow...somehow it just made her more beautiful. Kinda-kinda like one of those mythical Greek sirens, or something. I dunno,” he muttered, then shrugged, as if both satisfied and unsatisfied with his description.  
  
“So anyways. That last night. I was asleep, I think, when I heard my mom scream.  I was already running down the hall when I heard a guy’s voice screaming ‘Mary! Mary!’. I think that must’ve been my mom’s name...but I’m not sure. Anyways. The guy must’ve been my dad, and hearing his voice, the direction it was coming from—it made me realize that I’d been running the wrong way. Guess I must’ve been heading towards my parents room at first. So I doubled back, and I was just running, following his voice.  
  
And then-then he was right there suddenly. In front of me, in the hallway. And he handed my baby brother over to me, and told me to run, to get out of there, to get my  _brother_  out of there. To-to....to keep him safe. And so that’s what I did. I ran. Got outta there fast as I could. Didn’t even notice the smoke, or the heat from the fire. Not till we were outside, in the cold. And then, then I just remember standing out there on the lawn, looking up at the nursery window, at how it was this crazy, bright orange from the flames of the fire inside. And just— hey. Hey! You okay, there? Dude, what’s wrong?”

I blinked dumbly, realizing those last questions were meant for me, that Dean was now looking at me and waiting on an explanation. An explanation as to why I was looking like I’d just seen a ghost. Or rather, like  _I_  was the ghost, since I felt like all blood and color had just drained from my face, and judging by the way Dean was looking at me, it must’ve shown.  
  
“Your parents died in a fire?” The words tumbled out of me in a whisper that was filled with shock and awe that was hard to ignore, much as I may have wanted to.

“Uh. I think so,” he replied, even as the question still remained on his face. “I mean. I don’t know if they ever did get out—I can only assume. Since, y’know...” He trailed off.

“Huh,” I murmured.

 _And oopsies._  Was that really out loud? I had to actually still my hand to prevent it from clapping over my mouth, even as I sat there and watched Dean’s brows furrowing implausibly even closer together.

“ _Huh_ , what?” he pressed.

“I...”  
  
My voice tasted too thick in my throat, sticking to it. Swallowing hard, I shook my head. Tried to shake it— _this_ —off, push it away.  
  
This was impossible.  
  
This was insane. Of the certifiable variety.

And if  _I_  thought so, then surely Dean—I eyed him carefully, studying him.

There was no way for Dean to  _not_  think that this was completely off-the-deep-edge. But then again, at this point it was already too late for anything else. Fucked if I do, even more fucked if I don’t. Not in the good sense of the word, either. Seeing as he was obviously waiting for some sort of explanation for my reaction, something with at least a token amount of plausibility to it. Even though the truth was probably not much more believable than whatever lie I could pull together on such short notice, I decided to go ahead and go with it.

I watched him closely from beneath downturned eyes as I began.  
  
“Okay. So remember-remember when I asked you, in the elevator at work that day, if you ever have dreams? Like,  _weird_  dreams?”  
  
He nodded, waiting for me to go on.  
  
“Well...” I murmured, drawing out the last syllable. “ _I_  do.”  
  
He made a high-pitched huffing noise, a sound that fell at some disturbing middle point between a schoolgirl giggle and a sigh.  
  
“Yeah, I got  _that_  much,” he snapped back.  
  
When the full force of my glare hit him, he stiffened, then nodded for me to continue as he returned to cleaning my face. He tilted my chin this way and that to examine his work, before settling in to wipe the caked-in blood that ran its way from the seam of my jaw down along my throat.  
  
I let my eyes fall shut and gave myself up to his ministrations as I continued.  
  
“Okay, well see, I’ve had these dreams all of my life. Some of them are really jumbled, like just quick flashes of images...all kinds of images, but mostly where I’m hunting....uh. Stuff.”  
  
I paused, considering how much information he really needed in order to make sense of all of this and how much would be too much, way too soon.  
  
“I’m not sure what they mean, really. If it’s something that already happened—like some buried memories or something. Or if it’s something that’s maybe gonna happen, or even if it’s something I actually saw myself. I mean hell, for all I know it could just be something from some movie that my mind just—” I trailed off when I noticed Dean was fast approaching the end of his attention span. “Right. Well anyways, so there’s this one dream in particular—it’s the clearest, the longest, of any of them. And I can always remember having this dream. Not sure how old I was when it started, but....I do know that I can’t actually remember a time when I  _didn’t_  have this dream.   
  
“And it’s the same thing. Every. Single. Time.  
  
“I’m lying on my back, and there are all these stars above me—y’know, like those fake glow-in-the-dark kind that you stick to the ceiling? Yeah. So I’m looking up at them, and then this mobile starts playing, starts spinning around above me. I don’t even know how long I’m staring at the thing going around and around. But next thing I know, it’s like I’m waking up from a trance, or something. And then I’m looking up at the ceiling again.  
  
“Except this time—this time there’s this beautiful angelic blonde woman up there. It’s like—it’s like she’s pinned there, or something. I dunno. But it’s like, one minute, she’s just suspended there, held flat against the ceiling. And just...so beautiful.  _So damn beautiful._  And then the next minute her eyes suddenly go wide, and her mouth drops open, and then—then she’s soaked in blood and she’s burning.  
  
“And it’s so quiet and loud at the same time. She’s not making any sounds at all, and so it only makes the sound of the fire crackling and that ridiculously  _happy_  music from the mobile seem so much louder. And just wrong. And I wanna look away. So bad. But I can’t.   _I can’t._

“But then there’s this shadow that falls over me, and I can’t really tell what it is, only that it’s blocking the fire above me—the light and the heat of it. It must be a person though, because in the next moment I’m getting picked up, moved. And then just as suddenly we’ve stopped, and I get handed down to this boy...I don’t know how old he is exactly, or really anything. All I can really recall clearly is that he’s got this mop of gold hair.

“Well, I guess it’s really blond, but I dunno, in that strange orange light from the fire it really does look like it’s spun gold, especially how it glows on top and around the edges. Like where the light shines through it, y’know?

“Anyways. I don’t know what the other guy’s saying to him, but it’s obviously  _something_ —something important at that. Because the kid’s nodding at him, hard enough to make that gold hair of his bounce with it. And I can feel his heart going faster and faster against my cheek.  
  
“And then we’re moving again. Fast. And then down. And everything’s black—I think maybe he must’ve covered me or something, because I couldn’t see anything but just blackness all around me, but I could still hear his heart beat, feel it hammering against my skin.  
  
“And then, suddenly, he’s holding me tighter. Like he could somehow tuck me right inside of himself if he just mushes us together hard enough. And that’s when I realize we’ve stopped moving. I blink my eyes open, and all I can see is these big huge army-green eyes above me. He’s staring up at something, and—and I can see the orange glow of the fire flames reflected in his pupils and in these big fat tears that are just clinging to the kids’ ridiculously long lashes. 

“And just when I start to worry that he doesn’t even remember that I’m there—that he’s holding me—well, that’s when I start noticing that he’s stroking his hand over my back, and then he starts whispering to me. It’s like he’s chanting it, like it’s some sort of mantra, the way he keeps repeating the same words over and over— _It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay._ ”  
  
My eyes shot open, suddenly aware that Dean’s hands were no longer on me, only to find Dean stumbling away from me, bloody cloth forgotten where it had fallen to the floor, mouth working overtime, yet still not making a sound.  
  
I reached out my hand, tried to coax him back.  
  
But he looked like he was lost, eyes unseeing, face gone pale and even more prominently dotted with those damn freckles of his, as he took one more step back, and then another. He seemed to not even be aware that he was doing it, like he’d slipped into some sort of catatonic state.  
  
“Dean? Hey. Hey!”  
  
He flinched, finally looking up, visibly snapping back to himself.  
  
“Hey, man. Relax. You gotta relax for me, okay?”  
  
His eyes fell to the floor, to where the cloth was still laying in a crumpled heap, right where he’d unconsciously dropped it. He took a step forward, shooting a quick glance my way before he reached down to pick it up.  
  
“That’s—that’s impossible,” he stammered, and I honestly couldn’t be sure if the statement was aimed at me or at himself.  
  
That is, until those green eyes snapped up to mine and pinned me in place, at once accusing and bruised.  
  
“How?”  
  
There was something entirely too wet and broken in the whispered word. He tried to swallow it down, the movement of his Adam’s apple sliding against his throat too loud. The sound sick and wrong, like bones cracking. He licked his lips, mouth remaining parted and ragged breath falling hard and fast, making the air between us—making  _everything_  between us—too heavy.  
  
“But how could you even know all of that?” he shook his head. “That’s...it’s....”  
  
“What?” I asked gently after he fell into silence, either unable or unwilling to put his question into words.  
  
He shook his head again, more forcefully this time.  
  
“I.  _I remember that_. Holding my little brother while I was standing there on the lawn, staring up at the fire. Telling him—”  
  
He broke off, scanning my face as if he’d somehow be able to find the answer to the great mystery there.  
  
“But...but how is it even  _possible_? There’s. There’s no way for you to know all of that. I mean, you say you’ve had this dream all your life, right? As in, way before we ever even met?”  
  
He used his hand to motion frantically between us, his eyes begging for an answer I simply didn’t have.  
  
“I. Yeah. I don’t have a fucking clue, man.”  
  
He scowled at me, and made a sound that came suspiciously close to a growl.  
  
“What?” I raised my palms in front of my chest in mock-surrender, lips involuntarily curving into a sheepish grin. “Sorry, dude. But I honestly don’t have a clue how all this is possible.”  
  
His frown deepened as he kept his gaze fixed on his hands, dipping the cloth into the already-pink water and working much too furiously to rinse it clean once again. The red seeped into it, making trails and darkening the water to the point where his hands took on the red tint. I sighed, turning my eyes away from the sight, from  _my_  blood on  _his_  hands, my own monsters twisting his body, throwing it into too-hard angles of fear and stress and pain.  
  
I could feel my shoulders move up in a pointless shrug, one that would undoubtedly go unnoticed seeing as he was currently putting all of his attention on looking anywhere  _but_  me.  
  
“Hey, man. A few weeks ago—hell, a few days ago—if someone had told you about demons and ghosts n’ all that shit being real... _Dude_. You’d have laughed at ‘em and said that  _that_  was impossible.”  
  
He snorted.  
  
“Yeah,” he grudgingly conceded. “Yeah, I guess.”  
  
And he  _seemed_  to be satisfied with that. At least mostly.  _I_  should have been satisfied with that.   
  
Or at least left good enough the fuck alone.  
  
Still, just because I had seen plenty of impossible things with my own eyes—especially in the last couple of weeks—well, it certainly didn’t  mean I could stop wondering at  _how_  exactly they’d come to be. Or why.  
  
“Huh,” I observed rather intelligently, causing Dean’s eyebrow to jump all the way to his damn hairline in response, and causing me to then immediately regret it, as well as hate my apparent inability to  _not_  think out loud in front of this guy.  
  
I shrugged noncommittally, letting my eyes slide away to a spot on the carpet that suddenly seemed to be the most fascinating thing ever.  
  
“I dunno...” I hedged, drawing out the word into entirely too many syllables, just trying to buy some time.  
  
I braved a brief glance over at him, before returning my attention to my new favorite spot on the floor.  
  
“Maybe...maybe we’re like...somehow psychically connected, or something.” I blurted out, slurring the words together in my haste to get them all out before I could change my mind.  
  
“What, like...  _soul mates_?” He spit the word out, like it was too disgustingly saccharine to even stomach, before he dismissed it with a shake of his head and a laugh that was just a bit too hard.  
  
As if it was the most ridiculous idea ever.  
  
And okay, fine. Maybe it was.  
  
Okay, yeah. Yeah. It totally was.  
  
Not to mention sappy as all hell. All that was really missing was candles and rose petals. So what if it didn’t  _feel_  like it was quite as ridiculous as it  _should_  be? It was. It most definitely was.  _It had to be_.  
  
I gave a small laugh. And if I was more laughing at how crazy it was that somehow the words  _hadn’t_  felt so ridiculous, than at dismissing the words  _themselves_  as ridiculous, well then...it wasn’t like either of us would benefit from me actually disclosing that information. And so I did what I always do, what I’m so very good at doing—I rerouted.  
  
“So, uh...did you ever try looking for them?”  
  
His eyes shot to mine, blank for a split second before understanding settled in.  
  
“Oh. Yeah. Yeah. A while back, I did, yeah. But I never did find much.” He shrugged. A moment later, his eyes slid back to look into mine. “What about you?”  
  
“Yeah, I looked too.” I replied, before letting my eyes fall shut once again as I surrendered myself to the soothing touch of warm cloth and even warmer fingers. “Couldn’t find a damn thing.”  
  
And then it hit me, much much later than it really should have. But the magnitude of it took even longer to settle, since I stupidly went on and asked. As if there wasn’t a perfectly good reason that he hadn’t said the specific words out loud.  
  
“So hey. What about your brother?”  
  
He was silent for the longest time. I guess we both wished that I hadn’t asked that particular question, and for a crazy moment there I was actually relieved, thinking that maybe he was just going to ignore it. That maybe we could both just move on and pretend that I’d never uttered those words.  
  
But no such luck.  
  
When he finally spoke, there was something not-quite dead in his voice, more like something that wished it was dead.  
  
“We got placed with different foster families. I. I never saw him after that night.”


	10. Chapter 10

_I just know there's something dark in me. I hide it. I certainly don't talk about it. But it's there. Always. This dark passenger. And when he's driving, I feel...alive._   
  
_Regardless of the fact that I know, I just know, that one day it will be precisely this—this dark, dark thing inside of me—that will lead me to the end of my story._   
  
_~~~_

 

It had started out just like any other hunt.  
  
Except, y'know, that it was in the Sandover offices.  _Once again._  
  
I knew that I shouldn’t do it, told myself as much even as I followed the scent down the hall. And yet, my feet just refused to listen, only quickening as the scent grew stronger. I caught a glimpse of what simply had to be my prey, but he ducked around the corner up ahead almost as soon as I’d managed to spot him. By the time I got there myself, the hallway seemed to be empty. I continued forward cautiously, and that was when I spotted it. I grinned to myself at the tell-tale sight of the men’s room doors just sliding shut, and quickly slipped inside.  
  
The man really didn’t look like much of a threat. That is, until he turned around and smiled at me. There was something in that gleeful too-bright glint in his eyes, something behind it. Whatever it was, all I knew was that I really didn’t like it.  _To put it fucking mildly._ He must’ve seen something in my face that had given me away, because it made him suddenly break out into peals of laughter.  
  
And it made me see red. I wanted that all of that amusement to be ripped right out of his throat—and I wanted to be the one to do it. I raised my hand to do just that, but then...nothing.  
  
Absolutely nothing.  
  
I looked dumbly from my hand to him and back again, and then gave it another go. But still, nothing. I just kept staring at him in utter disbelief with my hand suspended in the air in front of me, as if the world would somehow right itself and work like it was supposed to any minute now, if I only waited it out long enough.  
  
When his laughter finally subsided, he seemed to notice my hand straight away. He stared at it for a moment, mesmerized. The corner of his mouth twitched into a lop-sided grin. Cocking his head thoughtfully, he glanced back and forth between my face and my hand several times. His grin went wide and razor sharp.  
  
And then I was suddenly flying through the air, being deposited none-too-gently against the cool tile of the wall. His hand curled around my throat, gripping tightly as he used his hold to pin me against the wall. His eyes danced merrily over my face, one finger slowly tracing its way along the side of my face.  
  
“Oh, I’m afraid you’re gonna have to do a whole lot better than these cheap little pet tricks of yours.”  
  
I tried to jerk my head away, but it only made his hand close around my throat that much tighter, his laughter bubble out that much louder. Every breath I struggled for became shorter, the space for it growing only more limited within his grip. And all I could do was just stare at those sharp features of his, contorted with equal amounts of amusement and fascination, and try not to think about the fact that this would probably be the very last thing I’d ever get to see.  
  
Because this was it.  
  
I was sure of it.  
  
As the edges of my vision grew dimmer and dimmer, closing further and further in and pretty soon all I could see was the dark laughter in his eyes, each breath burned hotter and more painful than the last; each breath felt more and more like the final one. I didn’t know how many more I had left in me, but I was absolutely certain that it couldn’t possibly be any more than a handful. While I’d certainly never imagined my end would come like this, I couldn’t really say that I was surprised by it.  
  
I  _was_  surprised, however, at the loud whap that broke into my ever-darkening haze not a moment later.  
  
Eyes popping open in shock, my vision was suddenly filled with the stranger’s face twisted up and to the side as he spun away with the force of the hit. And suddenly, the space in front of me was filling with none other than the face of one Dean Smith, eyes blown wide with alarm. He blinked at me, once, twice, and three times, before his lips spread into a sheepish grin.  
  
“Hey, man,” he whispered, reaching out a hand to gingerly touch my shoulder. “You okay?”  
  
I opened up my mouth to answer, but before I could say a word I was interrupted by a groan, drawing both of our attentions back to the stranger.  
  
“Ow!” he cried out, though it was a yelp filled more with surprise and indignation, than anything resembling true pain.  
  
He scratched at the point of impact on the back of his head as he turned around, then proceed to throw back his head and roar with laughter. Dean and I exchanged puzzled looks, and then shifted around to stand shoulder to shoulder as we waited anxiously to see what would happen next.  
  
“Oh! I’m sorry, I’m sorry...” he wheezed out through the last of his cackles, making a frantic gesture with his hand before he reached up to wipe at the corners of his beady little eyes.  
  
“It’s just—wow. I certainly did not anticipate happening onto  _quite_  this much luck.” He let out another quick sharp bark of a laugh. “Quite literally!"  
  
Pausing to take a deep breath, he seemed to visibly collect himself, drawing his shoulders back and smoothing out his collar. He made a mockery of dignity as he straightened out and looked down his nose at us.  
  
“I mean, honestly. Just imagine my good fortune...strolling right into this most fantastic little two-for-one special!”  
  
He grinned to himself, but it fell away as soon as he took in the not nearly as amused narrowed set of my own eyes.  
  
“Ah, but never mind all that,” he dismissed, the tone of his voice suggesting that it was some great act of magnanimity for him to overlook our apparent faux-pas.  
  
He took a step closer.  
  
“Let me just say, that it  _is_ so very nice to officially meet you. The  _both_  of you.”  
  
He looked from me to Dean and back again, his lips turning up faintly at the corners.  
  
“You know...put a face to the name, all that good stuff.”  
  
The guy’s eyes jumped giddily back and forth between my face and Dean’s, looking like he was expecting comprehension to dawn any second now. Finally, something seemed to shift behind his own eyes. He took a step back, making a disapproving clucking sound with his tongue, and then waved his hand in the air with a dramatic flourish. It felt like we had disappointed him in some vague way.  
  
“Oh, but where  _are_  my manners? I never  _did_  introduce myself, now did I?”  
  
He looked back and forth between us again, expectant, as if he was actually waiting on a reply, as if this was actually some sort of a two-way conversation.  
  
“Well then, let us correct that, shall we?”  
  
He placed a hand over his chest in an exaggerated theatrical gesture, and bared his teeth in a bastard cousin of a smile—too hard and big to be considered anything that even aspired towards friendly. It made me recall learning that chimpanzees did something similar when establishing their dominance. In a different situation, I would have snickered. As it was, the sound of his voice slipped its way under my skin, and made all the blood in my veins feel like it was suddenly pumping in the wrong direction, away from all the essential organs that needed it so very badly in order to function properly. Or, you know, at fucking all.  
  
“I. Am Alastair.”  
  
 _Alastair._   _Alastair?_  Like,  _Alastair_  Alastair?  
  
 _Oh holy shit. Alastair._  
  
Dean and I turned to each other, exchanging a quick look that was equally wide-eyed and panicked on both our ends, before I turned back to face Alastair. Only to find that he was right there, his lips a mere few inches from mine, if that.  
  
He smiled at me serenely.  
  
“Ah, so I see my reputation precedes me,” he murmured, delight giving his already strange voice an extra wetness.  
  
Like it had been slicked with grease, or probably more likely, with the blood of a thousand poor innocent fuzzy little kittens.  
  
“I must say, it  _does_  so warm the heart to know that my fame travels so far. Even to the very smallest, darkest, most inconsequential suburban corners of the earth.”  
  
He tipped his head back, hungry eyes jumping back and forth from my face to Dean’s. Something about it reminded me entirely too much of the way a starving man might look at a buffet spread, struggling over the decision when faced with so many delicious choices. And that was one visual I could have definitely gone without. I guess you could say I was not used to being the one that’s on the menu. I set the full force of my glare on him, filled to overflowing with all the barely pent-up rage I was feeling.  
  
But it seemed that all I could do now was watch helplessly as that glint of glee grew brighter in his eyes; stand frozen where I was, as long bony fingers reached out to slither first along my cheek, and then Dean’s, that ugly too-bright smile of his growing ever wider.  
  
“You know...lost  _is_  a good look on you, boys. Really.”  
  
Stepping back, he tilted his chin this way and that as he studied us closely, weighing first Dean, then me, back and forth and back and forth until finally he threw up his hands in the air and barked out a laugh. The sound was entirely too giddy—I seriously expected him to clap his hands any second now. But instead, he just stepped towards us again and added,  
  
“I honestly can’t decide which of you wears it more prettily.”  
  
He gave a firm nod, like some sort of major decision had been reached, but then abruptly stepped back once more.   
  
“Ah, well. Much as I’d love to stay and continue our lovely little chat here, I’m afraid I must be going now.”  
  
He grinned, right before his eyes fluttered oddly and the irises completely disappeared, leaving only a garish luminescent white.  
  
“Aww, don’t look so worried boys. I’ll be seeing you again soon. Real soon.” His smile turned impossibly brighter. “You know, I’d cross my heart…except that I don’t have one. Guess you’ll just have to take my word on that one.”  
  
And then, just like that, he was gone.

  


**::**

“Fuck.”  
  
“Yeah,” I whole-fucking-heartedly agreed with Dean.

We stayed frozen to the spot—just as Alastair had left us—backs plastered to the stalls and staring straight ahead at the reflection of each other’s shell-shocked faces in the mirrors that lined the opposite wall. The only sound was our panting, echoing in the empty space, ragged and harsh. If nothing else, it  _was_  clear that we were indeed royally fucked. I wasn’t exactly clear on the specifics of the  _how_ , just that we definitely and unequivocally  _were_. So, very, very fucked.  
  
If the way he looked was any way to judge, apparently Dean hadn’t missed that particular memo, either.  
  
Eventually, I forced myself to get moving. Pulling myself up to my full height, I kept my eyes on my feet, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and pointing them in the general direction of the sinks ahead of me. I’d only gotten about halfway through meticulously scrubbing my hands clean (of what exactly I wasn’t really sure, just that there would be no trace of whatever it was left over after I was through), when I could no longer pretend to ignore Dean’s anxious shuffling behind me. Especially as it seemed to be growing in urgency with every passing huffed-out wheeze of a breath.  
  
I let out a resigned sigh, and raised my eyes to meet his eyes in the mirror. The question may have been left unsaid, but it was just as clear in the thin pursed line of my lips as it was in the challenging lift of my brow. Dean seemed to shrink back, both into himself and into the wall behind him. He laughed it off nervously, hand shooting up to scratch at the back of neck as he pushed himself upright and into what looked like a conscious effort at a less defensive stance. I kept my eyes fixed on him as I made my way over to the napkin dispenser and began to methodically remove every drop of moisture from my hands. Nodding my approval at his apparent choice (and a very wise one, at that) to remain silent, I finally looked away before tossing the paper away and heading for the door.  
  
“Wait!” Dean called out frantically.  
  
I paused mid-step, shoulders muscles stiffening into a rigid line of tension.  
  
“Oh. Uh.” Came the fumbling follow-up a second later, trailing off into a black hole of uncertainty that had me whirling around to face him with an impatient glare.  
  
He swallowed hard before giving me a hopeful smile, even if it was rather hesitant at that.  
  
“So. Um. What now?”  
  
I could feel my jaw clenching and unclenching wildly while I tried to temper my rage into non-volatile levels, working on taking a few deep, calming breaths. Vaguely, I could recall some anger-management tip about counting backwards from ten. Although I kind of figured that I’d most likely done it all wrong, upon finding myself standing in front of Dean when I’d reached the number one, and realized that I’d actually used the countdown to count my steps towards the object of my rage, rather than using it to gain distance from the rage itself.  
  
Oops.  
  
I looked down at Dean, a cruel smirk spreading across my face when I noticed his own breath had quickened once again, going more and more unsteady as he watched my face loom over him. I slammed both palms against the stall on either side of his head, making him shudder right along with the line of flimsy doors behind him. Keeping our eyes locked together, I dipped my head just low enough so that my lips would brush against the paper-thin skin at the shell of his ear whenever I moved them.  
  
“You wanna know what’s next?”  
  
He gave me a faint nod, closing his eyes when the motion only succeeded in closing the distance between his skin and my mouth. He opened his eyes again a deliciously long moment later, watching me cautiously.  
  
“Okay, Dean. I’ll tell you  _exactly_  what’s next. For you, anyways.”  
  
He made this weak, alarmed whimper sound somewhere deep in the back of his throat—just a little past surprised, but not quite all the way up to outraged just yet.  
  
“Yeah, I’ll tell you what  _you’re_  gonna do,” I said, nuzzling just a little bit lower, into that spot right behind his ear. “For starters? You’re  _not_  gonna worry your pretty little head about all of this. Nope. You’re gonna get into that cute little socially-conscious hybrid car of yours, and you’re gonna go straight to your plush little apartment. And then you’re gonna make yourself one of those fancy little half-caf soy mochachino drinks you like so damn much.  _And you’re gonna fucking forget all of this and go back to your perfect ordered little life_.  ** _And most of all,_ you _’re gonna quit sticking your freckled little nose where it doesn’t fucking belong_.** ”  
  
I could feel my voice going quieter, deeper, more deadly with every single sentence.  _More scary._  Even so, I just couldn’t bring myself to care much at this point. No more than I could stop myself from watching with rapt fascination at the way Dean’s eyes seemed to grow ever wider in response. That is, until I released him with a final shove back, away, setting the whole row of stall doors behind him rattling violently with the force of it. But I’d barely taken two steps away when a hand wrapped around my wrist and pulled, bringing me nose to nose with what would seem to be a highly irritated Dean.  
  
Actually, fuming was probably a more accurate word.  
  
He let out a long, hard exhale, nostrils flaring as he glared his fury up at me.  And then, without the slightest bit of warning, he gave my wrist another hard tug, bringing my face so close to his that our lips were almost touching.  
  
“I don’t fucking think so,” he growled, right before he surged up to slam his lips against mine, pushed his way inside.  
  
It was hard enough to bruise, and over just as quick as it began—just one sure, determined flick of tongue, measuring the space inside me. Then he was retreating, teeth dragging their way down along my lower lip, hanging onto it as he lowered himself back down from his tiptoes until my lip finally slipped out of his grip.  
  
He proceeded to just walk on past me, all cool and calm and collected as can be, stopping in front of the mirrors to study his reflection as his hands went up to smooth over his suit jacket, then moving over to adjust his tie. I swiped at the moisture still clinging to my mouth with the back of my hand, staring down his reflection in the mirror glare.  
  
“ _Excuse_  me?” I hissed, drawing out the word in outraged disbelief.  
  
His eyes flicked up to mine, before giving the most massive eye roll, with a put-upon sigh to more than match it. Tilting his chin up, he gave his tie one final tug. He turned around to face me, draping himself into a half-seated position over the sink with his ankles crossed, the very picture of casual disaffectedness. He regarded me silently for a moment, before his mouth tipped up into a tiny smile.  
  
“I think it’s a bit too late for that now...don’t you?”  
  
I was reduced to pretty much just death glares and strings of enraged (and mostly incoherent) syllables.  
  
“Oh, c’mon, Sam,” he cut me off, dismissing my protests with no more than a disapproving flick of his eyes. “Do I really need to point out to you that this Alastair dude seemed to be just as interested in me as he was in you?”  
  
“Exactly!”  
  
The mocking tone to my voice was at least half intentional, even if it wasn’t all that much of a premeditated effort.  
  
I knew exactly what was happening here.  
  
I had easily slipped into the safety of defensive ground, naturally retreating into familiar holding patterns, tried and true: tease and torture, pretend you honestly don’t give two fucks.  _Even less._  But I must have been pretty rusty, because it didn’t seem to go over too well. Or at least, not as well as I was counting on, seeing as it was pretty damn clear that Dean knew exactly what was happening here, too. The look he gave me as he studied me for an unbearably long moment—it made my skin itch, the way he seemed to see right fucking through me and not miss one little thing on the way there. At long last, he pushed off his perch.    
  
“Yeah, Sam. Exactly.”  
  
And that last word was pronounced with such finality...it kind of made me stumble, eyes shutting against the weight of it for just a splintered second.  
  
When the world came into focus again, it was to the sight of Dean walking towards the door. But he paused right next to me, those pretty plumpy lips of his only inches from my neck—right there where it dipped into the collarbone—his eyes sliding up to look straight at me before moving off to some spot behind my shoulder.  
  
“Like it or not, Sam...we’re in this together now,” he voice had taken on a softer quality, his point having been apparently established, every syllable leaving a hot little puff of air against my skin. “And we’re gonna figure a way out of this.  _Together_.”  
  
Without so much as a backward glance, he walked way, not even bothering to move out of my space, so that his shoulder shoved mine back as he passed by me and made me half-turn in my spot.  
  
The heels of his loafers echoed loudly against the tile floor. The sound made my throat go dry, the way that each click click click somehow managed to synchronize itself to the pounding of my own pulse. Or maybe it was the other way around. And honestly, I wasn’t really sure which scared me more.  I swallowed hard against it, still working on which of his assertions were more preposterous—the  _we’ll figure out a way_ part, or the  _together_  part—when the sound of the door creaking open managed to snap me out of my incredulous stupor.  
  
“Where the hell d’you think you’re going?” I threw his growl back at him.  
  
He turned around, fingers wrapping around the edge of the door to keep it propped open as he looked over at me, his face the picture of choirboy innocence. That is, up until it broke out into the most evil little smirk.  
  
“ _We_  are going back to my place,” he announced. “And putting together a game plan.”  
  
I snorted.  
  
He regarded me coolly for a moment, and then his smirk spread into a lopsided grin.  
  
“If you fail to plan...you plan to fail,” he informed me, punctuating it all with a wink.  
  
“Oh, wow,” I snickered. “That’s...that’s brilliant. Did they teach you that little gem in your fancy school,  _college boy?_ ”  
  
He didn’t even flinch at that. Just let his head fall back and fixed me with a sweet smile—sugar laden enough to induce a diabetic coma.  
  
“Aww. Don’t go getting’ all butthurt over it like that, man.”  
  
I glared at him murderously. And for a practiced killer such as myself—that really is saying something. His smile didn’t fade in the slightest.  
  
“Hey. If it’ll make you feel better, I’d be more than happy to get you one of those personal planners. Y’know, the ones that have inspirational words of wisdom printed for you for each day, all nice n’ neat like? I’m sure you’ll pick it up real quick, Sammy.”  
  
And with that, along with an entirely too self-satisfied wink, he walked through the door without so much as looking back to see if I would follow.  
  
 _Smug fucking jerk._


	11. Chapter 11

“Okay so here’s the thing.”

I arched my brow at him. Because really, helpless as I was to stop this thing at this point, I was still painfully aware that no good conversation ever starts with that particular opener. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then started pacing back and forth furiously, scuffing up the otherwise immaculate hardwood floor of his living room with the heels of his loafers. My mind started drifting towards thoughts of whether Dean hired a maid to keep his place so ridiculously spotless, or whether he himself would get down on all fours to scrub out the marks...but of course he had to drag me right out of that happy place with his next words. 

“Y’know, it was weird, but…when I hit that evil son of a bitch? I dunno man, it just felt…right.  _Natural_ , even.”

He paused his speaking as well as his dizzying pacing, urging me to take this in— _understand_ —with shiny fevered eyes. Sighing fitfully, he fell against the back of the couch beside me.

“It was just. Like, for once, I didn’t have to think about what to do with hands, or my body. I just.  _I just did it._  You know?”

His pleading goddamn  _dewy_  moon eyes were just unfucking fair. I sighed, shaking my head.

“Okay. What’s your point, man?”

He buried his finger into his hair, tugging on it as his eyes scanned my face frantically, moving this way and that way and then this way again. Then he shrugged, ducking his head.

 “I dunno. I just thought that maybe…maybe I could help you with hunting this Alastair dude.”

He looked up at my snort of a laugh at that, his entire face going hard.

“What? It seems like you could definitely use it.”

I had to clamp down on my jaw, so that it wouldn’t drop like some ridiculous cliché of a cartoon.

“And who says I’m even going after this _‘Alastair dude’_?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re sayin’ you’re  _not_?”

I crossed my arms, glaring back hard.

“I’m saying it’s nothing for you to concern yourself with, sweetheart.”

He huffed out a derisive laugh as he dropped his eyes to his feet, crossing his own arms and doing just about everything he could to distance himself from me, short of actually moving away. He used his toe to scuff at some invisible spot on the floor and busied himself with intently watching its movement.

“Yeah,” he muttered through tight lips a second later. “’Cause it’d be pretty damn stupid if you  _didn’t_.”

“Oh, you think so, huh?” I retorted, before I could think better of goading him on.

His head shot up, eyes going wide for a split second before hardening, settling into someplace right between determined and challenging. “Yeah. Yeah I do.”

We locked gazes with each other, me slowly losing the battle with the smile that was tugging harder at my lips with every passing moment, his own features going tighter and tenser in response. It was obviously too late for me to take back the challenge, and it was definitely too late for him to  _not_  accept it.

“I mean...unless you wanna just wait around for him to come back n’ kill you,” he amended.

The  _And me_  was left unsaid, but it was written all over his fucking face, left to hang there in the thick air between us. I remained silent, just stared back at him wordlessly. He met my stare head on, before finally looking away with a disgusted huff.

“What, you don’t actually believe he’s  ** _not_**  gonna come back for you, do you?” he demanded.

I just kept up at my mute tight-lipped staring.

“ _Oh my god, do you?!_ ”

I wasn’t quite sure what was more comical—the shrillness of his voice, or how incredibly high up on his forehead his eyebrow managed to leap. If it were any other time—or if it were any other topic, for that matter—I would’ve probably enjoyed mulling over this for much, much longer. As it were, it was my irritation that took up most of my higher brain function at the moment. Irritation that not only did I have to answer him about this subject, but that I  _kept_  having to answer him. I pursed my lips to the point that I thought I might very well swallow them, before finally responding.

“Okay, fine. Let’s just say, for just a minute, that I  _do_  go after him,” I waved my hand dismissively. “And on top of that, let’s also say that I allow you take  _any_  part of it.”

I shot him a warning look when he bristled at my use of  _allow_ , challenging him to so much as utter one word about it, but he settled himself down and nodded his head for me to go on. I smiled at him indulgently.

“I’ll be generous here and give you  _all_  of that, okay? So. Please tell me, just how is it exactly that you think  _you_  are gonna be helping  _me_ ”

I raised up my hands up defensively when he looked like he was in serious danger of boiling over at that particular word choice. 

“I’m being completely serious here, Dean. Not trying to mock you in any way, I swear. Like, what specifically is it that you envision yourself doing? ‘Cause I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that I’ve been doing this for plenty of years before you came along…and that I’ve never once needed anyone to hold my hand.”

I gave him an overly sweet smile, batting my lashes exaggeratedly for maximum effect. And okay, maybe that part  _was_  a little mocking—but the question still remained.

“Yeah, well. You sure weren’t complainin’ about an extra hand earlier, now were ya?” he snapped back.

I could feel my smile fall instantly, the skin around my lips going tight.

“Still didn’t answer my question, Dean.”

At that, his own lips spread into a smile that was infuriatingly wide and bright, and his eyes—I swear I could almost see a 5 year old kid in there, squealing and clapping his fucking hands together.

“Oh me? I’ll be doing what I do best, Sammy.” He leaned back, crossing his arms and giving me a goddamn wink. “Research.”

I chose to ignore his answer, in favor of the more serious—and fucking alarming—subject at hand. “Did you—did you just call me  _Sammy?!_ ”

My voice broke off dangerously, filled to brimming with indignation as it was.

But it didn’t seem to phase Dean one bit, his pleased smirk not showing even the slightest sign of wavering. Instead, it only broadened, as he hopped off the couch with entirely too much goddamn  _bounce_  for my taste.

His only answer was a shrug, even as he started off down the hallway, not even looking back to make sure I would follow.

Of course, I hurried after him, wanting to ensure he could hear—as well as feel—my hissed-out warning, as clear as if I were screaming the words.  “Yeah, well... _don’t_.”

The only indication I got that my words had registered with him was the movement of his back in a delicate shiver, and the slightest slowing of his step that came with it.

 

**::**

 

Without another word, or so much as a glance, he kept walking towards the back of the apartment. And without much more left for me to say past that, I just found myself trailing him numbly, then standing behind as his desk as he seated himself and turned on the computer. As the thing whirred to life, he turned to look up at me over his shoulder, his face all lit up, with so much more than just the pale light that the screen was throwing on it.

_He looked downright fucking giddy._

I quirked a brow at him, curious but also, admittedly, equally irritated. His face split into a grin.

“Google it,” he said, waggling his eyebrows and fucking beaming up at me. As if he’d just hand-delivered the wonders of fire to the caveman.

I let out a disbelieving snort.

“You’re gonna Google, what… _Alastair_?”

He lifted his shoulder in a shrug, turning back to his computer.

“Yeah, why not. That’s as good a place to start as any.”

“ _Alastair_ ,” I scoffed. “You’re not gonna find any—”

He whipped his head around not even a second later, grin dripping with  _I told you so_ ’s as the screen behind him brought up about a million or so results.

 _Oh_.

“What d’ya say, Sammy? You feelin’ lucky?”

He leered up at me, threading his hands together and stretching them out to crack his knuckles before turning back to the screen and clicking on the first link. I was opening up my mouth to inform him that my name was  _Sam_ , when the page had finished loading and the intended words were replaced by a gasp instead—a noise that was echoed by Dean, in rather comical unison. We watched the screen with twin gape-mouthed stares, looked at each other, and then back on the screen again. It wasn’t even that it was completely unexpected—but still, that could only do so much so lessen the shock value of it all.

Because Alastair, was apparently classified in Christian demonology as not just any old run-of-the-mill demon. Oh no, Alastair was the big boss of torture in hell, right hand to Lucifer himself. And when Dean clicked back and when on to the second site, and then the third, we only came up with the exact same information, along with pages upon pages detailing characteristics, abilities, and vulnerabilities, along with spells, chants and just generally crazy ass hoodoo satanist shit.

“Hey,” Dean’s voice snapped me back to the room, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what reason he could possibly have for still wearing a huge smirk on his face. Unless his need to be right was truly beyond all bounds. Or possibly, that looking at everything as a goddamn joke was his coping mechanism of choice.

“You wanna maybe quit hovering and pull up a chair? Looks like this might take just a little while.”

I vaguely registered the chair when it hit the back of my knees, and I was honestly just too far gone along my merry way to freak-out-land to do much more than fall into it and watch the screen as Dean scrolled through page after page after page. A couple of hours and about a case of beer later, it all finally got to be too much.

And by too much, I meant too completely ridiculous for my brain to process, which caused me to just break down into the most massive giggle fit known to man, the tears making my vision go blurry. Of course, the incensed look on Dean’s face was still oh so very clear, and only made me double over and sound  _that_  much closer to a rabid hyena.

Because this was obviously a case of information overload. Y’know, like when someone goes to research shit on WebMD and ends up diagnosing themselves with cancer? Except that Dean, apparently, didn’t agree.

“Oh god, I’m sorry. Okay. Okay,” I wheezed, after finally managing to pull myself together. “So what you’re telling me here is that you  _actually,_   _really_  think that he’s an honest to goodness demon.”

It wasn’t a question, because the whole concept was so utterly ridiculous that this couldn’t possibly be where Dean’s conclusions were actually heading towards. Conclusions, as in based in known fact, logic, reason and just plain common fucking sense.

“Well I don’t know that you’d wanna call a demon ‘honest to goodness’,” he shrugged, brow furrowing in thought a moment later. “But it  _would_  explain the whole poofing thing…and the eye thing.”

I stared at him, mouth falling open on a gasp, before I finally managed to close it shut. I shook my head in an attempt to clear it.

“Okay, okay. So say that yes, we agree; he  _is_  a demon. Which, y’know,” I made a sound which matched the frantic motion that my hands made between us, hoping that it got my opinion across adequately as to the complete  _insanity_  of such a conclusion. “That  _still_  wouldn’t explain why he’s so interested in me. Or even knows who I am,” I added belatedly.

I snorted.

“I mean, I think I’d remember if I’d made some sorta deal and signed my soul away.”

Dean was obviously not quite as amused. Or maybe he just didn’t get the joke. I began to open my mouth to explain it, when the look on his face stopped me mid-tracks. He was looking at me like  _I_  was the one that needed something obvious explained to him.

“I…what?”

“Seriously?” he scoffed.

“What?”

“You honestly can’t even think of  _one_  reason why a demon might be interested...in  _you_?”

I looked at him blankly, patience growing thin as I waited for him to elaborate. He rolled his eyes.

“’Cause I can think of several. Hmm, lemme see. There’s the whole wizard hand thingy you do, and then there’s the fact that you not only kill on a regular basis, but also  _drink blood_.”

He was counting it off on his fingers as he said it. He looked remarkably calm for a moment. But then he suddenly went pale, eyes almost popping out of their sockets.

“Holy shit! Wait. Wait, wait, wait,” he smacked me hard on the arm. “What, uh...what was that thing that chick you killed the other night said? Something about coming here to investigate why a bunch of her ‘friends’ were goin’ missing?”

I swallowed hard. “Mmmhmm. And that—that Alastair wouldn’t be happy about it.”

“So if Alastair’s a demon, then how…how exactly did she even tell him? And—and why exactly would a demon— _the_   _fucking big boss of torture!_ —give a crap about this chick’s ‘friends’? Unless—of fuck—oh fuck—unless —”

“Hey! Hey, hey, hey, Dean. Stop!”

I grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to shake him out of it, but it only made his breaths come out faster, jerkier, eyes going ever wider and showing more of the whites with every downward sweep of those long lashes.

But it was the wet and high pitched wheezing that really got me worried. I got a hold of the back of his chair and used it to tug him towards me, between my spread thighs, until he was close enough for me to throw a hand around him. Wrapping the other hand around his neck—right underneath his jaw line—I used my hold to get his chin up, forcing his eyes to look into mine as I pressed in even closer.

“You will stop this. Now.” I said, voice pitched low; cold and hard and unbendable.

It made him whimper, one single violent shiver racking through his entire body. But his eyes seemed to refocus onto mine. And even though he looked frozen, quite the picture of that quintessential deer caught in the headlights, he seemed to at least be looking  _at_  me now, no longer just through me.

“That’s right,” I told him, thumb stroking my approval where it rested along his pulse point. “Now nod, so I know you’re gonna do as you’re told. Like a good little boy.”

His eyes bugged out again, but he gave me one faint nod nonetheless, even as he swallowed hard, the movement straining and sliding its way against my palm.

“Okay. Good. Now breathe normally. And calm the fuck down.”

I held him in place, keeping my grip tight around his neck as I fixed him with a warning look. He gave another weak nod, eyes locked on mine as I watched him closely for compliance, cataloging inhale and subsequent exhale until I finally released him with a nod of approval.

“And stop getting the fuck ahead of yourself, too,” I muttered, settling back into my seat.

I watched him nod again, still satisfactorily submissive, out of the corner of my eye.

Well, now that that was settled...the sound of a throat clearing awkwardly brought my eyes straight back to Dean, who for all intents and purposes looked like the perfect little apologetic child—head down, eyes lowered, hands folded onto his lap.

It was just his mouth that was the problem. Specifically, the fact that he wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping it shut. Or at least, not for very much longer, if the way that his teeth chewed at his lower lip were any type of dependable indicator. When he finally spoke, it came out soft and pouty—a perfect match to his pretty little bitten-red lips.

“But I wasn’t really jumping all that far of ahead myself,” he insisted in a half-whine, half-whisper, eyes flicking up to mine imploringly before skittering away again. “Not—not really.”

I shot a warning glare his way, but he only seemed to take it as an invitation to defend his statement.

“Well, I wasn’t! That chick  _did_  warn you. That—that this guy named Alastair was gonna come. And—and not be happy. And now he’s here. And sniffin’ around Sandover and obviously he came here about these so called ‘ _friends_ ’ of hers—”

“Dean.”

“And he definitely seemed  _real_  happy to find you—”

“Dean.”

“And me.”

“Dean!”

He froze, swallowing hard.

“What? I’m just saying…hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe—maybe these people that you hunt that all seem to have this certain evil something-something in common. That maybe—maybe there’s a reason…that maybe they’re—“

“Enough.”

He cringed back, looking down demurely at his lap where he clasped his nervous hands together tight enough to make the knuckles go white. But after a moment, his eyes timidly rose up to mine again.

“Well?” He demanded.

I sighed heavily, shutting my eyes and reaching up to rub at the pain that seemed to now be pooling right behind them.

“Of course it’s  _occurred_  to me,” I replied through clenched teeth.  “Ever since the dude said his name I’ve been thinking back to what that girl said. And how she might be connected to this Alastair dude—”

I leveled accusing, tired eyes right on him, lips curling into a bitter smile.

“Didn’t need no  _Google_  to tell me that much.”

“Oh.”

And at least he looked suitably cowed.

“Yeah,  _oh_  is right.” I huffed. “But knowing all that. Hell, even let’s say knowing he  _is_  a demon. That still doesn’t get us even one step past square one.”

Dean gave me a truly befuddled look.

“It still doesn’t tell us shit about how to beat this guy,” I clarified. “Need I remind you that my usual tricks aren’t really doin’ it this time around?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

He sat there, gnawing thoughtfully at his bottom lip with his eyes down and lashes fringing oh so prettily along his cheekbone. And me? I really didn’t want to think—already did much too much thinking than I really cared for at the moment.

So I just sat there and stared at him instead, stared at all those all too pretty doll-like features, watched the uncertainty that twisted them yet somehow managed to make them even prettier and more delicate than before. It should have been impossible; it was beyond unfair....and I couldn’t have looked away if the devil himself had picked that moment to set me, or anything in the vicinity, on fire. So of course, when he looked up a few minutes later and totally caught me in the act, I couldn’t bring myself to care much. Or to look away.

He held my gaze for a few long breaths. It was almost like he was waiting for something, but when he figured out that it wasn’t coming, the corners of his lips tugged up into the faintest of smiles, almost imperceptible, but for the way it reached his eyes; the way that it seemed to shine so much more brightly there.

He tipped his head back. “You know what we need to do?”

Oh, well. I could personally think of  _several_  things. Mostly starring those pretty bitten-red lips of his. His beaming smile was shy and hopeful, and I had to bite back the groan of frustration at what was could possibly be hatching behind those feverish eyes of his.

“We need to start at square one.”

“I… _huh?_ ”

“Square one, dude!” He declared. “Okay so we don’t know just yet how to beat this Alastair dude, but maybe we get  _there_  by first figurin’ out how exactly we got  _here_.”

I cocked my head at him.

“What we need to do is figure out how you  _got_  your superpowers, man. And how they work n’ shit.  Hell, even what exactly they  _are_.”

“Uh huh. And how exactly do you propose we go about doing  _that_?”

“ _Investigate_ ,” he waggled his eyebrows wildly. “The biggest unknown we’ve got is your birth, right? Who were your parents, what happened to make them give you up? So. That’s where we gotta start.”

“Oh my god, what an awesome idea!” I bounced around in my chair, clasping my hands to my chest, before letting the faux excitement slide off my face and slumping back. “Yeah, except for the part where I tried that already. And came up with exactly jack and squat.”

He let out a pained sigh, rolling his eyes exaggeratedly.

“You know what you need, Sammy?”

I grimaced.

“I told you not to call me that.”

He completely ignored my warning, and went on to eagerly supply the answer.

“What you need is a paradigm shift!”

Slinging an arm around my shoulder, he pulled me in tightly and swept his free hand in front of us in a wide semicircle, in a move entirely too reminiscent of a show tune number. 

He motioned with his head towards the area, like he wanted me to see something where there was only empty space, and announced proudly, “Blue sky thinking, man.”

I couldn’t believe this was actually happening.

“Oh god,  _please_  tell me I heard that wrong.”

“See? There ya go again,” he clucked his tongue in disapproval. I rolled my eyes at him in return, but it just made his grin that much wider. “C’mon, man. You know what they say.”

I groaned.

“No, but I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

“Can’t win if you don’t play!”

“Oh my god, just stop.”

His smile tipped into manic territory. It was really quite terrifying.

“ _Please._ ”

Nothing. His smile didn’t even show the faintest hint of retreating.

“Can’t expect to score unless you get on that field.”

“Oh god I’ll do anything. Please. Just stop.”

 

**::**

 

After a long couple of hours arguing over it, and against all my best judgment, I reluctantly agreed that full disclosure was necessary—much as it broke every single rule that had guaranteed my survival up till now.

He was just too persuasive for his own damn good.

And so I told him about my earliest memories, about finding out I was adopted, about the way I’d lost control the first time I’d killed, and about all the rules I’d made for myself since then so that I wouldn’t lose control ever again.

To his credit, he didn’t flinch. Much. And he just went on, chipping away it, looking at it from every angle, kind of like my life—or  _I_ —was one of his business cases. But we still ended up pretty much exactly where we’d started before our fun little sharin’ and carin’ session—as far as I was concerned, anyways. Dean tapped his finger to his lips, eyes half closed.

“The thing I keep coming back to is…why the hell are you dreaming about  _my_  childhood memories? Or, I mean. How.”

I looked at him blankly, and gave a half-hearted shrug. Saying  _I don’t know_  again just seemed too depressing.

“C’mon, man. I’m serious here.”

He ignored the pissy look I shot him.

“Like, are they even related to you—to your past, in some way?”

He studied me critically, and then added in a soft, hesitant tone,

“Or maybe—maybe that freaky wizard hand thing you do isn’t your only power. Maybe you’re psychic, too.”

I thought on that.

“Well. I mean those particular dreams—y’know the weird ones—they always  _do_  end up giving me these killer headaches.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, yeah.” I said, but then shrugged it off. “But I mean, I’ve yet to predict the future, or anything.”

We both grew quiet, turning it over in our own heads as if it might somehow magically all fall into place. Eventually, I let out a frustrated sigh.

“I just dunno, man. And I don’t see how we can find out, either. I mean. Okay, that dream—it’s obviously what happened to you. When you were a kid. But as for as why I’m dreaming about it? Why I’m apparently seeing it all through the eyes of your little brother? Who the fuck knows, man. And I don’t have anything from before, like any pictures or anything. So I have no clue what I even looked like, or what my family looked like, y’know? Hell, it doesn’t even make sense that I’d be dreaming about my own memories, seeing as I don’t  _have_  any memories. I mean, no one remembers anything before they were like 2 or 3—never mind  _six_   _months_.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, waving it off. But then he grew quiet, forehead constricting. “But on the other hand, your name  _is_  Sam.”

“Well, Samuel to be exact. But c’mon. Do you know how many Samuels there are in the state of Ohio alone? Besides, we look nothing alike.”

We regarded each other, cataloging features and bone structures.

“Hell, I look more like my adoptive siblings than you.” I chuckled, and he joined in with me after a second.

“’Kay,” he said after our laughter had died down. “So we’re going with psychic then.”

I raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t say a word. We were both done with this conversation, even though we might have also been equally reluctant to admit that it was so.

Out loud, anyways.

 

**::**

 

But my brain was apparently not quite done with the topic.

Because that night, I dreamed.

And dreamed.

And dreamed.

And then dreamed some more.

And when I woke up, it was to the most painful headache I had ever experienced—which didn’t come as much of a surprise, seeing as that dream had probably been one of the most vivid I’d ever had, certainly the longest. If dream time were to be trusted, that is. But much as I may have wanted to pull the covers over my head and be left alone to die in peace, I had that oh-so-familiar pair of green eyes staring at me, waiting. I groaned and tried to retreat under the covers anyways.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he crooned above me.

“Mnnnffff,” I replied through the sheets.

Silence. Blessed silence.

But then, a tug. And then another one, more insistent.

“You okay in there?”

I made what I hoped would be interpreted as an affirmative sound, keeping the sheets tucked in tight around me.

Silence.

But then sneaky fingers prodded their way inside my cocoon, and then pulled it down just enough to reveal a sliver of the room, and those damn eyes.

“That one of  _those_  dreams?” he asked.

I nodded, only to instantly regret it as my whole world contracted into the painful throb that split my brain in two. I held my breath, eyes closed, as I waited for more questions. But nothing came.

Instead, I felt the bed dip beside me. And if I’d been in any less pain, I probably would have forced my eyes open to check if Dean had indeed gotten off the bed. But as it were, I just lay there, frozen to the spot, just grateful for the twin gifts of silence and stillness.

All too soon though, the bed dipped again, and my hand was forced around something cold and smooth. A glass of water, I sighed gratefully as my eyes landed on the thing, before looking up at the feel of something pushing at my lips. Dean smiled sweetly down at me, raised the pills he had between his fingers for me to see, and then dropped them down into my eagerly opening mouth.

“Thanks,” I croaked out.

“Yup,” he whispered back, ducking his head away.

A second later, his eyes flicked back up to mine.

“That. Uh. Looked intense.”

“Yeah,” I agreed on a low sigh.

We lay there quietly for a minute.

“Man, it really, really was,” I murmured, eyes sliding to glance at him before turning back to stare at the ceiling.

“It was a lot more intense than usual.”

“Really?” Dean asked, turning on his side and practically hovering over me. “Do you remember anything then?”

I winced. “Could we please try for our inside voices, man?”

“Oh. Oh yeah, sure. Sorry.”

I grunted.

“Well?” he asked in a soft whisper, drawing out the word.

“Yeah, sure. I remember stuff.”

He made an impatient little noise, and it was way too hard not to laugh at that.

“Look, I usually remember stuff,” I said. “But yeah, this dream was just…I dunno. It just felt really real, for some reason.”

I shrugged.

“And?”

I looked over at him and gave him a small smile.

“And…it actually wasn’t all that exciting. It was just you n’ me, walking around some storage place. Looking at all these jars, and treasure chests and—”

“What, like pirates’ treasure type treasure chests?” he interrupted.

I tried to roll my eyes at him, but it made my head hurt worse so I didn’t try again.

“Uh. No. Maybe. Well, I don’t think so?”

He gave me an impatient look.

“I mean, I’d say they looked more like Indiana Jones territory,” I replied.

At his raised brow, I added, “Like, magical. Or something. Like…you’d probably be better off not opening them, y’know?”

We fell into a silence, each of us sinking into our own thoughts.

“D’you think it’s real?”

“Hmm?” I asked, his words startling me out of my head.

“D’you think it’s a real place? This storage room place that you dreamed about?”

“I…I’m not sure.”

He shrugged. “Well it’s worth a shot, anyways.”

“What’s worth a shot?”

“Finding it!” He huffed out, narrowing his eyes in warning at me when I opened my mouth to protest. “Look, if it is a real place, then maybe—maybe we can find some clues there.”

“Clues.”

“Yeah, clues. Something about who we are. Or at least why you’re dreaming about it. How it’s all connected, y’know?”

“Dean,” I stopped and took a deep breath, pushing down my frustration as I tried to figure out the most effective way to let him down easy. “This...this isn’t some sorta scavenger hunt, okay?”

“I know that.”

“This Alastair guy, whatever he is—he’s not playing. This is  _not_  a game to him, and it shouldn’t be to us, either.”

He put up his hands to stop me. “Look, you don’t think I get that?”

We stared each other down for a beat.

 “Just do me a favor, okay?” he said at last, pleading with some pretty damn fierce puppy dog eyes and a small, hesitant smile. “Humor me?”

“I dunno, man.”

“Look, if we manage to find it, and there’s nothing there except a bunch of old rank-ass jars, then you can laugh at me all you want and never let me live it down. ‘Kay?”

“Yeah, well. I was gonna do that anyways,” I shot back.

But I could already feel myself caving. After all, with so little stones for us to turn over, it would be pretty stupid not to look at every single one we managed to get our hands on.

**:**


	12. Chapter 12

 

**_ He made me think for the briefest moment I might even have a chance to be human. But wishes, of course, are for children. _ **

_ ~~~ _

 

 

As it turned out, I  _did_  end up remembering enough of my dream.

The details must have been buried just under the surface, because Dean was able to talk me through his visualization technique, and I managed to recall that I’d been holding the key to the storage facility, which not only had the unit number imprinted on it, but also the name of the place along with contact information. After that it was a fairly straightforward online search. Almost too easy.

And so here we were.

It should have probably alarmed me much more than it did just how easy it was for me to break us into the place. But I suppose I’d had plenty of years to get used to the idea. Dean, however, had not, and took it upon himself to make me more than well aware of the fact, as well as demanding to know just how I’d picked up  _that_  particular skill set.

Pointing out that it seemed to just somehow come naturally to me, much like swinging that tire iron at Alastair had come to him—well, it didn’t seem to make the tight lines around his mouth relax any. But it  _was_  enough to get a nod out of him, as well as a reluctant unspoken agreement to move past it.

I suppose that this was at least partly due to the fact that looking around at the contents of the packed storage locker seemed to be a whole lot more likely to end up helping us get somewhere (on our little quest, anyways), than trying to come to terms with something neither of us fully understood. As we picked our way through the place, I was too busy trying to figure out the contents of the shelves, brain running overtime with guesses as to what all these things could possibly be—or do. Which is probably why I gasped like a little girl when I ran smack right into Dean, who had apparently stopped ahead of me.

“Dude,” he hissed in warning. “You wanna watch your step, maybe?”

“I dunno,” I hissed back. “You wanna maybe not stop right in the middle of where I’m going?”

He just glared back in response, jaw muscles twitching, before his entire face visibly smoothed out and he turned his attention back to the shadowed lump that had previously held all his attention. The  _huge_  shadowed lump, that is. He nudged my elbow, looking up at me over his shoulder with an excited little-boy grin.

“Dude. What d’ya think’s under there?”

Honestly, judging by the general size? A small boat would not have surprised me.

“I dunno, man.” I shrugged. “Only one way to find out, right?”

I walked around him and then proceeded making my way to the other side of the tarp-covered mass, grinning at him from across the thing before tugging the material off. And shit. That—that was exactly what we’d come here for; what been looking for.

_A connection._

Our eyes met across the miles and miles of shiny jet black steel, seeming to defy all laws of nature by sparkling even in the dull darkness of the storage room. Dean stepped closer, hand reaching out to touch, as if on autopilot mode.

“The Impala.” He breathed, voice all choked up with awe.

“So you. Uh,” I cleared my throat. “You remember this car, too?”

His eyes snapped up to lock on mine, stuck in a daze for a moment before shaking his head.

“Yeah, yeah. I. I remember helping my dad fix it up n’ stuff sometimes,” he said, eyes travelling far away as he let his hand slide along the outline of the roof, down to the trunk, the corner of his lips twitching up into a faint smile.

“Actually, I’d usually just get put right up here,” he rapped on the trunk once, then looked back up at me. “Or, I’d be in charge of the interior. I’d sit inside and listen to tunes and just...yeah.”

I gave him a small, encouraging smile.

“But wait. Do  _you_  remember it, Sam?”

“Well... _remember_  is a strong word,” I winced. “But I’ve definitely seen it in my dreams.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah. Haven’t we all, buddy.”

I laughed at the hard-to-miss sexual husk that suddenly overtook his voice, one that was currently mirrored in his lust-filled eyes.

“Not  _those_  kinda dreams, Dean,” I admonished, with a suitably disapproving roll of my eyes. “But, uh. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen it in that dream. I’ve seen it parked in front of that house that night, I think.”

We got lost in each other’s eyes for a moment, but then I shook myself out of it and reached for my lock pick. Right as I was putting it to the lock, however, Dean’s hand wrapped around my wrist, halting any further movement.

My head snapped up to look at him, only to be met with an outraged Dean glowering down at me.

“What the hell, Sam?”

“Uh. I’m sorry, but did you have some other brilliant plan to get into the thing?” I jerked my wrist out of his hold and motioned in the car’s general direction.

He just kept staring down at me in outraged silence.

“What, you got a set of keys on you or something?”

Still, yet more glaring. And silence.

Now it was my turn to glare, rising to my full height and taking full advantage of my slight advantage in that department over him. I lay my hand on top of the Impala’s roof, drumming my fingers against it as I pushed myself into his space.

“Well?” I demanded.

He swallowed hard, eyes falling to where my lips were just barely grazing the seam of his own, before slowly raising them back to mine.

“’S not that hard, Dean. A yes or no answer will do just fine.”

He held himself taught, every muscle going rigid.

I pushed myself closer. Our lips pressed together, rubbing them back and forth and back and forth, pushing this way and pulling that way, until the movement finally forced his mouth to fall open. And when it did, it was on a gasp, pained and just about the sweetest thing that any sound could rightfully lay claim to; just enough room to work with for me to take his lower lip up between my teeth and bite the warning into it. When I let it fall away, his tightly held full body shiver that ended up escaping as only the faintest of tremors made my lips curve into a smile, even as I kept them snugged up to his still-parted mouth, my lower lip fitting so very perfectly into the o-shaped space.

“I’m waiting.”

He gave one single petulant shake in answer as his eyelids fluttered shut, and kept his head turned away, tucked into his chin.

 “What was that?” I asked, relishing the way irritation bunched up in his shoulders, muscles going visibly rigid. “I couldn’t quite hear you, sweetheart.”

 “No. I don’t have keys,” he mumbled dejectedly, seeming to sink even deeper in on himself.

“But that doesn’t mean we should break into her,” he added, finally raising his eyes to meet mine, chin tilting up in a determined angle.

I stepped back, turning once again towards the car and kneeling down to get a better angle at the lock. With my pick once again in hand, I looked back over my shoulder at him.

“ _Her_ , huh?”

“Yeah.  _Her_.” He snapped back without the slightest hesitation, fixing me with an indignant look and folding his arms stubbornly. Defiantly. I offered him a small smile.

“Look, man. That’s real cute.  _Adorable_ , really. But did you wanna actually try to maybe do what it is we set out here to accomplish? As in, _sometime today_?” I waved the lock pick about wildly, to emphasize whether he wanted me to use it, or just forget the whole damn thing.

He gritted his teeth, but then motioned for me to go on with a sad little much-put-upon sigh. I could tell, though, that he stayed real close; the feel of his eyes on me were like their own damn heat source. When she gave way, it was with a click and a groan, as well as a pained whimper from Dean’s all-too-close vantage point. In all honesty, I thought he might’ve just fallen to his knees with the grief of it. Which is why I was caught off guard at the hand that clamped down on my shoulder as soon as I opened the door, and held me to my spot in its vise grip.

I glanced down to see Dean looking up at me with a polite smile, all nonchalant like, before he used his hold on me to push his way further in between the car and me.

“You mind?” Dean asked with a cocked eyebrow.

Though it wasn’t technically a question, seeing as he didn’t seem to feel the need to wait for an answer, just slipped by me and ducked inside. I bent down to look inside, only to find Dean seated as if he were already driving, hands resting easily on the steering wheel, and eyes closed, a dreamy look softening all his features. Shaking my head, I walked around to the other side. At least he hadn’t been too far gone to unlock the passenger door for me—or maybe he’d just managed to do it before the car-lust daze had fully set in. Who knows?

Doing my best to ignore the complete and utter ridiculousness that was Dean right now, I forced myself to do something that could at least be classified as somewhat productive. I started looking around the beast of a car, trying to see if there was actually any useful information to be found anywhere inside the thing. Seeing as it was probably as good a place as any to start with, I reached for the glove compartment, smoothing my hand over it and saying a quick prayer before trying it.

_And score._

The handle lifted without very much resistance, the door falling open with only a slight creak. It was enough to knock Dean out of his trance, though. We exchanged a wide-eyed glance before I turned back to examine the contents of the glove compartment. On the very top, lay what looked to be a journal, black and leather-bound, and bursting at the seams.

_Well this seemed promising._

I’d barely had a chance to open it, when I felt Dean’s breath on my shoulder.

I looked over at him, eyebrow raised. But he only smiled at me, sweet as can be, before he looked back down at the journal. And then he just went on reading over my shoulder, even going as far as giving me an impatient look when he finished reading the page and apparently wanted me to go on to the next one. When I didn’t, just glared at him in utter disbelief, he simply reached over and turned the page himself. I was still staring at him, when his eyes suddenly got wide and he made some sort of excited high-pitched noise somewhere in the back of the throat. I looked down just in time to see the thing being snatched away from my lap.

“Hey!”

Already leaning back into the his seat and looking like he was getting comfortable to settle in for a good long read, his eyes slid over to mine at my protest, and he shot me a blindingly bright grin.

“Nice going, man,” he said and gave me a congratulatory pat to the chest, before turning his full attention back to his little ill-gotten prize.

Well, as long as we got any of the useful information that might be inside the thing, I supposed it didn’t much matter which one of us did it. I comforted myself with that logic, anyways, even as I gritted my teeth against all the pornographic  _oooohs_  and  _ahhhhhhs_  that were coming out of him. A cursory shuffle through the rest of the glove compartment’s contents revealed nothing but the usual documents, though the car’s VIN would certainly be worth checking out, if nothing else.

“Hey, Dean?” I said after I’d taken out the useful documents and closed the glove compartment.

“Hmm?” he didn’t even look up, eyes rapidly moving across the page as his index finger slipped under the corner of the next page. I snorted.

“Think you could maybe tear yourself away long enough to pop the trunk for me?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah.” He leaned down, hand feeling around for the latch, eyes still not parting from his reading.

And that was pretty much it, I kinda lost it. Okay, no. I really lost it. Actually threw my head back, my whole body shaking with the laughter. And when he gave me the finger—with his eyes still glued to that damn journal—well, it only made me laugh that much harder. There may have been some highly-attractive wheezing involved.

The trunk, as it turned out, was some sort of magical bottomless arsenal. Seriously, there had to be small countries with less fire power. Not to mention the other less, shall we say, mainstream equipment. I shut it, leaning on it heavily.

“Well fuck,” I muttered.

Dean’s head popped out of the driver’s side.

“Right?”

I tilted my head in confusion at that, prompting him to wave the journal about somewhat wildly.

“Do you even know what this is, Sammy?”

He impatiently waited for his pause to reach adequate dramatic proportions, before finally allowing himself to gesture with the book again.

“This right here,” he announced so very proudly, getting to his feet and depositing it on top of the trunk right in front of me. “This is all the answers we’ve been looking for.”

“That so?” I made a show of flipping through the book. “So...it has my family’s history then? Or yours?”

I could feel the smile fade from his lips, but I went on mercilessly.

“It says who we are? What happened to us before we got adopted?” I looked up at him, my face a picture of innocent hopefulness.

“Uh, no—”

“Oh. So...it has contact information on my birth parents, so we can go look them up? Start filling in all those ‘holes’?”

“Well, no. But—”

I opened my mouth to speak again, but he cut me off with an irritated huff.

“Look, man. It’s got something way fucking better than that! It’s like a supernatural instruction manual!”

I tipped my head back, considering him. After a long strained moment, he offered me an apologetic half-smile.

“Well okay, so maybe it doesn’t really give us much more specifics about our own personal history, or how it’s— _we’re_ —connected. But if Alastair is what we think he is, or hell, if he’s any kinda legit supernatural  _thing_ —well, all we gotta do is just look up his...uh...species, in here. And then we’re good to go, man!”

If nothing else, I couldn’t deny that he looked like  _he_  at least believed it. Wholeheartedly so. My eyes flicked down to the book, then back up to Dean and down again.

“Really,” I muttered, about a million miles from convinced, as I opened it once more and started skimming through the first few pages.

“Yeah. Really.”

Surprisingly enough, he  _was_  right—at least in theory. The pages were filled with detailed profiles of various supernatural beings, the stuffs of fairy tales and campfire ghost stories stuffs. Except that the way their weaknesses and modes of disposal, along with all their other characteristics, were catalogued to the minutest of details...in a strange way, the information seemed scientific. Or, at least, seemed to be rooted in our world, far removed from make-believe. Either that, or it was just the ravings of some lunatic. After all, no one thinks they’re crazy—even the craziest nut jobs of ‘em all.  _Especially the craziest nut jobs of ‘em all_.

I could feel the line of my lips go thinner and harder, even as I kept my eyes lowered and continued to dutifully go through the journal, page by endless page. Finally, I flipped the book shut, staring at the random patterns that my fingers were tracing onto the back cover.

“I—I just don’t know, Dean.”

He made a high-pitched outraged sort of squeak. Kind of like he was choking on something.

“What the hell is there to  _know_?”

I looked up at him, unworded apology shining in my eyes.

I felt something odd, rising in my throat. I almost envied his blind faith. Or maybe it was just that I wished I could have that kind of innocence—the kind that would allow for me to believe in fairy tales, where the hero always slays the monster in the end. Of course, being the monster of the story tends to change your perspective.

“Dude!” Dean went on excitedly, refusing to accept whatever it was that he’d seen in my eyes. “This means we actually have a snowball’s chance in Hell—‘scuse the pun—at actually beating this Alastair dude.” He let out another annoyed noise at the unchanged state of my unconvinced expression.

“Y’know, to send that fugly-ass beady-eyed little bastard straight back to hell?” He stopped himself, pulling his feverish-bright eyes away from me and looking like he was trying to make a concerted effort to pull  _himself_  in, to get back to a less manic level of excitement, before continuing.

“But that’s not even the best part!” His face split into a child-like grin. He slapped my chest with the back of his arm, before adding, “Dude! We get to be heroes!”

The look of abject horror on my face only seemed to feed his smile more power, going from sunny to super fucking nova.

“The both of us!” he proclaimed, as if that somehow would explain it all.

 _And, yeah. I got that part_. Actually, that was exactly the part that I wasn’t exactly sold on.

“Well, it would  _appear_  that way,” I replied. “But—”

“ _But?_ ”

“ _But_ , we have no way of actually knowing that!”

But his only response was to look at me as if  _I_  was the one who’d gone off the reservation, like it was just beyond him as to how one goes about explaining why two plus two is indeed equal to four. So now it was my turn to wave that journal around like a weapon.

“You’re seriously just gonna take everything in here at face value?” I sneered, setting the book down on top of the trunk and shoving into his space. “And how exactly do we know that it’s not just all some made up stories, hmm?”

He began to answer me, but I cut him off with a slam of my hand on the book where it rested behind him, his eyes going wide at the angry creaking of the metal upon impact.

“We don’t have any proof that any of these...these old wives tales and home fucking remedies even work!” I added, voice dipping into no more than a growl.

“But we don’t know that they  _don’t_ , either!”

“What, were you lookin’ to test your brilliant little hypothesis on fucking  _Alastair_?   _On the fucking Chief Torture Officer of Hell himself?!_ ”

“No.” But the break in his voice would’ve given him away, even if it weren’t for the sudden shiftiness of his eyes.

I slammed my hand again, harder, the whole car shuddering with it, before I spun around and got some distance between us.

“Oh God,” I breathed. “You totally were.”

“So. What’s so wrong with that?” came, scratchy and sullen from behind me.

I whipped my head back to glare at him over my shoulder. He seemed to shrink back somewhat at that, enough for me to turn away again with a disgusted sigh, even if I  _was_  actively ignoring the petulantly stubborn frown still creasing his features. It seemed like he was backing off, just a little, but certainly not backing down. I took a deep, cleansing breath, rolling out the tenseness from my neck and shoulders before turning around to stalk towards him. Stopping practically right on top of him, I placed my hands on the car on either side of him, boxing him in.

“What’s wrong with  _that_ , is that we don’t know if any of this shit actually works,” I breathed against his lips. “What’s very fucking wrong with  _that_ , is that you could die.”

I sighed, shoulders slumping with the sudden very real weight of that, and looked away. “We both could.”

“Don’t we already have a death sentence, though?”

When my eyes snapped back to his, his face softened and he offered up a smile—earnest, even if it wasn’t all that convincing.

“Hey. At least this way we  _might_  not...right?”

I looked away again, because the sight of his face, hopeful and stubborn, left as much of a bad taste in my mouth as did the slowly but surely spreading realization that he was right. Of course, that only served to encourage him, apparently spotting the crack in my defenses easily and slipping right the fuck through it.

“Hey,” he said in a soft, gentle voice, nudging my shoulder.

Like I needed comforting, verging on coddling. Revulsion bubbled up in my throat, but I couldn’t say which was more disturbing—if it was that he thought I actually needed to be comforted, or if it was more that it actually did seem to settle something inside me. I looked away, anywhere but in his direction, the weight of his touch too much to bear, to accept, so openly.

“Maybe we could, y’know...test it out first,” he offered up tentatively. “Like, on the little leagues?”

I quirked an eyebrow at him. He gave me a small, unsteady smile, like he was venturing across a sheet of ice that might shatter under his feet at any moment.  

“Yeah. Y’know, like…start out on the small-fry foot soldiers, before the big level boss?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, but. We still don’t know for sure that any of that stuff’ll work.”

“So?”

When he saw the outraged look on my face, he added, “Look. If it doesn’t work, then you can still go ‘head and do your whole wizard hand thing.”

I hmm’d, slumping against the car beside him, but looking over at him every so often, my head tilting in consideration. I was slowly but surely—if rather unwillingly—being persuaded. I just wasn’t ready to admit it quite yet.

“What?” his jaw muscles jumped around tensely. 

“Oh, nothing.” I shrugged it off. “I just. I guess I’m just wondering exactly why this whole thing  _is_  so important to you, anyhow.”

He answered me with a shrug of his own, lapsing into a thoughtful silence.  Just when I thought that there wouldn’t be a more articulate answer coming, he mumbled, “Yeah, well. I guess I’m wondering why it’s  _not_  so important to you.”

The words were spoken so quietly, that I almost missed it. But I certainly didn’t miss the fire in his eyes when he finally raised his gaze back to mine. I felt the line of my lips go thin and hard, seemingly of their own accord.

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

He took a deep breath, his shoulders slumping down on the exhale before he consciously drew them back up.

“Look, I just. I just think you’re missing the point here.”

“Do you, now.” I smiled at him, cold and hard; amused, but really not.

He paused, as if he was on some tight rope and had to concentrate on holding every single muscle in his body taut so as not to fall.

A breath, and then another. A too-loud swallow. And then, “Yeah. Yeah I do.”

I motioned for him to go on. He looked away, returning his gaze to me a moment later, gentle and, at the same time, fiercely pleading. Like the edges had been sanded down, but the hot molten core had not been tempered in the slightest.

“Look, Sam, don’t you ever think about it? Think about what…what those things  _are_  that you kill? That you—” he swallowed, and by the sour look on his face it did not appear to go down very easy. “Those thing you, uh…drink?”

I regarded him coolly.

“No. Not really.”

And when I saw that look of utter wreckage twist all those too-pretty features of his into the most tragically beautiful picture of despair—well, there was nothing for me to do but to twist that knife, make sure to leave behind a scar deep enough that he would never be able to hide it—from the world or from himself.

“They’re monsters, Dean,” I told him. “Just like me.”

He lips quivered with the force of the angered, broken cry that he was working so very hard at swallowing down. Closing the little space that there was between us, I reached out to tuck a rebellious strand of hair back into that perfectly styled coif from which it had dared to stray away, before letting my hand fall to cup his face, thumb pad pressing along his cheekbone, back and forth and back again.

“But then again, it’s not like I’m telling you something you don’t already know, here.” I tacked on, gentle yet insistent.

I watched him carefully, both of us frozen in place except for the thumb I kept moving against that extra concentrated smattering of freckles at his cheek.

“Now, am I?” I added at last.

Because making that deep cut was all well and good, but it wouldn’t really matter much unless he saw it with his own eyes, saw that it was my hand that was doing it.

And that certainly  _did_  seem to do it. It got him going alright—though maybe not anywhere near the direction that I’d hoped it would, or even expected. Instead, his eyes went hard, frozen over, the speckles of gold turning to granite and crowding out the green, as he practically threw me off of him with growled obscenities.

Everything suddenly flipped over and under, and I found myself flat against my back. Dean was looming over me and shoving me harder into the cool steel of the car underneath me with each accusing dig of his finger into my chest, punctuating every spat out word. “Don’t. Fucking. Do. That. Shit.”

In hindsight, the confused look on my face—complete with furrowed brow and tilted chin—was perhaps not the best strategy to go with at that particular moment. Because all it managed to accomplish was to make him snort an unamused little laugh and shake his head.

“Don’t take the only ray of fucking sunshine we’ve gotten since—since this whole damn thing started,” he spit out, waving his hand wildly above us. “And…and…and turn into one of your self-hating emo shit-fests.  _That shit._ Don’t you fucking dare do it, Sam.”

I waited patiently, smoothing out any visible reaction from my face, as he lay above me, glare receding in equal proportion to the slowing of his out-of-breath pants. After what seemed like forever, he slid off of me with a last pissed-off glance thrown my way.

“Seriously, Sam. You need to think about this; about what these things are. And I don’t mean your stupid doomsday crap either.”

My only answer was an unsold grunt.

“They’re not monsters!” he shot a hard look at me. “Well, okay. Fine. You can call them monsters, in the sense that they do evil shit, or whatever.” He dismissed it with an impatient spastic wave of his hand. “But that’s not what they really  _are_. What they really are is demons, man. Devil spawn. They’re agents of  _hell_ , Sam.”

“Allegedly.” I muttered under my breath.

He stared at me, gape mouthed, before forcefully shaking himself out of it.

“Okay. Okay, fine. Let’s just say—for the time being—‘ _allegedly’_. But what if they  _are_  demons, hmm? What then?” He looked at me expectantly, waiting.

“Uh.”

He huffed. “Dude. Think about it! If it’s true...if those things you’ve been guzzlin’ on  ** _have_**  been demons all along, then that— _that means you’ve been drinking devil blood all this time!_ ” he choked out.

As soon as the words were out, his face changed. It twisted in disgust, as if he was actually trying to contemplate what that would taste like. “Can you say eww?!”

I was this close to going with  _it tastes like chicken_ , but the look in his eyes made me stop. Way too soon, I told myself, as I braced myself for what looked to be another approaching tirade. I wasn’t really sure on how I stood hearing a grown man saw  _eww_  like a little girl either, no matter how much sarcasm it was injected with, but that was neither here nor there.

“That—that can’t be healthy, man.”

When he saw that there was no response forthcoming from me, he grabbed for my shirt and shook me, his eyes all big and round and just begging for me to take this seriously. After a while, he released me with a frustrated whine.

“Seriously, though. That—that can’t be good. I mean, you shouldn’t…do that. To yourself.”

I snorted. “So what, you want me to do one of your cleanses, or something like that?”

Unfortunately, Dean wasn’t laughing. In fact, the expression on his face was about as solemn and serious as could be—and it only made me laugh harder.

Dean was even less amused at that. Instead, he drew himself up to his full height, crossing his arms and possibly even puffing out his chest as he fixed the full force of his dark, dark glare on me. “Uh, yeah, Sam. Or something  _exactly_  like that.”

Oh. Alrighty then.

Except not really.

I was still trying to figure out the best strategy to convince him that this was his most stupid idea to date, possibly the most lacking in common sense that has ever existed—in the entire history of the whole damn world—when he reached behind me for something.

Ah, of course. The bane of my existence, aka one dusty old journal. He raised it between us, holding it aloft reverently.

“Look, we’ve got this now.” he gave the thing a thump to illustrate his point.

“That means you don’t  _have_  to drink the blood anymore to kill them.”

I stared at him blankly, and he gave the book another triumphant little shake in front of my face. Gritting my teeth, I let my eyes slide over to the journal, and then slowly back to him. Because really, he could not possibly be this dense. No one could be that brain dead. I mean, talk about missing the entire fucking point.

“We can  _both_  kill ‘em,” he told me, as if it was the best thing in the world, as if it was a whole damn truck filled with puppies and fucking cupcakes, as if it was the answer to world hunger and the cure to cancer.  Or quite possibly all of the above.

And then he was looking at me like I was just too slow to get it and taking a deep breath as if he was preparing himself for  _really_  spelling it out.

“ _Together_ , man. No blood drinking needed—not when we got  _this_.” He punctuated it by pointing out the journal once again. I told myself to breathe deeply, trying to gather up my own reserve of patience. Or at least however much of it was left, at this point.

“Yeah. Well maybe I won’t need to drink their blood to  _kill_  them...” I muttered between tightly pressed lips. And with all the weight propped down on the word  _kill_ like that, I didn’t really have to spell out the  _but_. It hung—unspoken and heavy—in the air between us, making Dean’s face visibly fall.

“I. Look.” He lowered his eyes, licking at his lips nervously before meeting my gaze again. “I get this, okay? I get that it’s what you’re used to...that this is how you’ve done things, that this is how you’ve lived—for pretty much  _as long_  as you’ve lived. Well, at least for as long as you’ve lived on your own, anyways. Right?”

I nodded.

“But look. What if it’s  _not_  the only way? What—what if it’s not only that, but it’s not the right way? Not the way it was  _supposed_  to be? Not—not the way it was always  _meant_  to be?”

The giggle that bubbled out of me was  _just_  this side of manic. But it was entirely too close a thing.

“What? I’m serious. What if you’d known all along that there was this alternative? That you could kill ‘em with a good ol’ fashioned shot right between the eyes? Y’know, just like any other self-respectin’ civilized folk would?” He elbowed my side, mouth curving into a lopsided grin.

It was warm and easy, and I wanted nothing more than to return it just the same. But I just couldn’t. And it was that, more than anything, that hurt the most, that made me stumble back, away.

“Sam—”

“Don’t!” I warned him, cringing at how small and wounded my voice sounded, even to my own ears.

“Sam.” The word was drawn out, and it didn’t matter that it sounded like an outstretched hand more than anything else. Hell, maybe that made it even worse.

It didn’t matter, because I’d been wrong about him, after all. He obviously didn’t get a damn thing about me, didn’t see as much of me as I had suspected that he did. And if I couldn’t quite be sure whether I’d been terrified or relieved by the thought that this man could see me—well, that didn’t really matter much now. No, because he’d never really seen me at all.

Apparently he’d only ever managed to see me in some warped mirror image of his own form—wrong and off, but close enough to be twisted and shaped into something more familiar, more right, more human. Apparently, Dean Smith was no different than all the rest of them. Stupid and blind and capable of nothing more than the sum of his parts.

But most of all, human. Nothing more.

You think you’ve outgrown the sting of disappointment- that it is just a child’s unpracticed response, gone from an adult body that knows to expect what’s sure to come. But no, there’s nothing like a whole big pile of the stuff to make you realize just how small and stupid your really were. Because really, how could this possibly come as a surprise? How could—

“Sam?”

I looked over at him, and the sad smile was nothing more than a shadow on my lips. “You have no clue, huh?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yeah,” I let out a short, bitter-tasting laugh. “Me too. Me too.”

“What?” It was equally confused and demanding, and really, it was worse than dunking a wound into salt water.

I shook my head.

“You don’t even know why I do it,” I said, voice low and deadly. “I guess you never did. I guess—I guess all this time it was just wishful thinkin’ on my part...”

_That you’d really seen me. All of me. And accepted that real me. Of course you wouldn’t have—couldn’t have—if you’d really truly seen who I am, **what**  I am. After all, who in their right mind ever would? It was just my mistake for thinking someone like that existed._

I looked up when I felt the hands that closed around my shoulders squeeze tight and give me one quick firm shake.

“Look, Sam. I’m trying to be understanding here, ‘kay?”

He slung an arm around my shoulder and led us back towards the car. “But look, man. Even you’ve gotta admit it’s getting worse.”

I shot him a questioning look.

“The headaches, the visions...” He sighed wearily.  “ Y’know. All those little things that put the ‘extra’ in your extracurricular activities? The uh...shall we call ‘em ‘ _perks’_?”

He gave me a moment to process that, searching my face carefully. “See what you gotta understand, Sam, is...everything’s got fine print, man. Y’know?”

I nodded numbly, oddly unwilling to let go of this fucking strand of hope. That whatever point he was trying to make would prove me wrong. I don’t think I’d ever so fervently wanted to be wrong before.

“So okay, maybe that last vision you had—it  _was_  useful. I mean hell, I’ll be the first to admit that we would’ve never gotten here without it. But if all this blood is starting to make your visions stronger, and your headaches more painful, and all your freaky-ass superpowers just more... _more_. Well, doesn’t it stand to reason that it’s only gonna keep going that way?”

I shrugged noncommittally, failing to see what he was so worked up over. He groaned, hand going to the back of his neck to rub at it absentmindedly.

“I just. Okay all I’m saying is, what you’ve gotta do is look at the benefits, sure, but you also gotta look at the costs. And really, really think about whether those benefits will  _ever_  outweigh the costs.” His eyes darted away, but not before I managed to catch the tell-tale glisten in them.

“Dean—”

“Not to mention,” He cut me off, still refusing to look my way. “The fact that you don’t even  _know_  what the long term effects of this could possibly be.”

“Dean.”

“I mean it  _is_  demon blood, for Chrissake!”

“You’re right,” I whispered, admitting it to myself as much as to Dean.

“And what if we could kill those things  _without_  you having to drink their blood?”

“You’re right.”

A little louder this time.

“And—and what if you really didn’t have to drink it at all anymore and...wait. What?”

I smiled. “I said. You’re right.”

He tipped his head back to study me. “You did? Yeah. You did, huh?”

“Yup. Maybe you mighta heard me if you’d, y’know, taken just a half a second to  _breathe_.”

We both laughed.

“Yeah. Okay. And hey, look. I know it won’t be easy. But whatever you need, you know I’m—”

“Uh. I didn’t say I was gonna do it, Dean.”

“But—” he spluttered. “No. I. You just—”

I held up a hand to stop his incoherent babbling. “I said you were right—doesn’t mean I’ll do it.”

“You are unbelievable,” he hissed.

“Dean. C’mon.”

He shot me a death glare over his shoulder before turning away again.

“Look, doesn’t mean that I’ll  _never_  do it. I mean. I agree—I  _should_  do it. Uh. Well, probably. But c’mon, it would be just about the stupidest move, at least right now.”

He whipped around, his lips curling into an ugly sneer.”That so?”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Oh, please. Do go on. Tell me exactly why this isn’t  _‘the right time’_ ,” he sneered. “Oh yeah, and while you’re at it, why don’t you go ‘head and tell me when exactly the right time will magically arrive.”

I met his glare squarely, choosing to ignore the last part of his non-question and instead focus on the first.

“Well, Dean. I would say that right now, seeing as we  _are_  planning on going against all these supernatural beings, having some supernatural powers of our own is probably our best shot at surviving this thing. You know what? No. Fuck that. It’s our  _only_  shot.”

He shook his head in disgust. I leaned in closer to him, lips brushing along the spot on his neck right underneath his earlobe.

“And pretty much tossing those powers out right now— _like so much trash_ —when they’re actually marginally useful for like, the first time in...oh, let me see,” I pushed away from him, looking up to the ceiling and pretending to count off time on my fingers. “Oh yeah, for the first time in  _ever_. Well, that’d have to be just about the stupidest fucking move we could make at this point.”

I paused, taking in a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“And I’m sure that if you would actually take the time to step back, and look at this rationally, you’d see that I’m right.”

His head shot up, rage-filled eyes boring into me. “Oh, I’m looking at this rationally.  _Extra_  rationally.  _Super_  rationally, even.”

He leaned into my space until our lips almost met. “Wanna know what I see?”

I stayed frozen where I was, waiting for him to answer his own question.

“What I  _see_  is a fucking junkie,” he said, looking me up and down, lips curled cruelly.

“Too scared and too gone and too fucking blind to stop lying—even to himself.  _Especially to himself._  What I  _see_ —” he grabbed me by the collar and pulled me towards him at the same time that he pressed himself even closer “—is too pathetic to even reason with, because your body  is so polluted with your damn drug that you  _have_  no reason left.”

And with that, he let go of my shirt with a rough shove, before turning around to bury his head in his hands. It was like the assault, although originally meant to inflict pain on me, had ended up hurting him just as much. I wasn’t sure why it was so painful to watch him go through this, and I didn’t really care to examine it much. All I cared about was making it stop.

“Dean.”

No response.

“C’mon, Dean. Be serious.”

His head popped up to glare at me.

“Okay, okay. I get what you’re saying. Okay? But c’mon, don’t you think you’re stretching that junkie metaphor? Just a teensy weentsy  _little_  bit?”

“You think so, huh?” he sat up fully now, advancing towards me menacingly. “I suppose you  _would_.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes tiredly.

“Well that’s...suitably cryptic and catty. Two points for you.”

“Hey. All I’m saying is, the first step is admitting you’ve got a problem,” he shrugged. “And I guess they don’t say the first step is the hardest for nuthin’.”

“Hey,” I slammed my hand against the car. And okay maybe a slight jolt of satisfaction did run its way through me when that managed to not only get Dean’s eyes back on me, but also made him wince before he did so.

“Look. I get your point n’ all, okay?” I admitted. “But I am  _not_  a junkie.”

“Hey, man. Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.”

I was fuming. To the point that if smoke had actually started rolling off of me at this very moment, I would not have so much as given it as a second thought. Dean sighed heavily, his eyes going all gentle and sad as he looked me over and turned to fully face me. I was beginning to think that if I had to deal with that look too many more times he’d be dead before Alistair got back. 

“Look, Sam.  _I_  get what  _you’re_  saying. Really, I do. But, you know? I just can’t help thinking that this,” he waved his hand in my general direction. “This is exactly what every addict sounds like—whether it’s booze, or coke, or...or fucking  _demon blood_.”

I snorted. “Oh wow. Okay.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, a harsh tinny sound. “And I bet next you’re gonna tell me you can stop anytime.”

I glared at him silently. Because really, even dogs could only chew on one bone for so long. We stared each other down as time stretched thinner and thinner, almost to the breaking point. And then Dean just looked away, turned back to look at some invisible spot on the ground and left us both to sink into our own miserable thoughts.

I found myself wondering if it was actually physically possible to sit so close to another person and still feel so very alone, or if this just wasn’t really happening—if this was just some sort of weird trance-like state, or maybe even a dream. Because really, how could this be a real thing, to sit so close that our knees were practically touching, and yet to feel so far away from any other living thing?

“Hey, know how I mentioned the whole cost benefit thing before?”

Dean’s words startled me. Mostly because it seemed impossible that they would sound so close.

“Uh. Yeah,” I managed at last. “Yeah, sure.”

“Well, the answer’s no,” He said softly.

“No?”

“Nope,” he shook his head hard. “Benefits aren’t worth the cost.”

“Hmm,” I replied thoughtfully. After a moment, I added, “You sure you’ve weighed all the factors, though?”

“Yeah,” he answered, resigned.

“Look, Sam. I know you think this thing with Alastair...that your powers are our best weapon, or whatever. But this—this is me telling you that even  _that_  doesn’t change things. Even  _that_  isn’t worth what it’ll cost you in the end. What—what it’ll cost  _us_  in the end.”

I opened my mouth to answer him, but the words just wouldn’t materialize. In my head, or in my mouth. He put out his hand to stop me.

“No. Hang on, Sam. Just—just hear me out. I want you to know that I really do want you to get better, okay? I. I didn’t say all that shit to hurt you, or because I think you’re just some sorta dirty street junkie. And, like...dirt on the bottom of my $300 loafers, or whatever. And I just—” He broke off, scrubbing a hand over his face and groaning softly, before seeming to pull himself together somewhat and letting his hand drop, looking up at me with apologetic eyes. “Look, I really don’t want be  _that girl_ , but...”

I gritted my teeth. “ _But?_ ”

He sighed. “But...look, I’m sorry. But it’s gonna have to be the blood—or me.”

My mouth dropped open. He held his finger up, to signal for me to stop right there.

“Look, Sam. It’s more than just me standin’ here stompin’ my feet over this, okay? It’s that—” he gulped, then gave a sharp shake of his head as if to clear it. “I honestly just don’t think I can do this,” he used his hand to gesture to the space between us. “Knowing what you’re doing. What it’s doing to  _you_.”

He let out a hard, humorless laugh. “Hell, maybe it’s more the  _not_  knowing what it’s doing to you. And knowing that there  _is_  another way, a different way out there...y’know?”

He turned fiercely begging eyes on me, before letting them drop with a depressed shrug.

“All I’m saying is...I just. If I  _have_  to lose you?” His eyes flicked back to me, shining entirely too wetly. “I don’t think I can hang around and watch it happen, man.”

He looked away, unable or unwilling to meet my eyes after  _that_. And to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t real sure I could, either. Because that? That just completely wrecked me.  _And also made me happier than I could ever recall anything ever doing so_ , I admitted begrudgingly. Even if only to myself.

I was also quite relieved that he’d looked away because even though I didn’t want to see what his eyes held at this particularly crazy fucked-up moment, I couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away from him, bent and twisted and tortured as his turned-away profile currently seemed to be.

But after a long silence, that still hadn’t given me anywhere near enough time to prepare myself, he seemed to collect himself, resign himself to something—something which I instinctively knew wasn’t going to be a bucket of joy. Not by any stretch of the imagination, even mine. Straightening up, he squared his shoulders and lifted his chin and gave me one of those thin smiles that scored an A for effort but failed in every other measure.

“So I guess what I’m saying is...y’know those costs we were talkin’ about? Yeah, well. You can go ‘head and put me on that list too.”

And with that, he got to his feet, brushed off his pants, and proceeded to busy himself with fussing over the journal, pretty much looking everywhere  _but_  me, so that I could wrestle with that damn ultimatum of his—so that I could come to some sort of decision—on my own. But in the end, it really wasn’t much of a decision at all. That is, if you define a decision as consisting of more than one viable option.

“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth.

His head shot up, eyes scanning mine, guarded but hopeful.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I grumbled most unhappily, finishing it off perfectly with an award-winning melodramatic sigh. Even if I do say so myself. “Now let’s get outta here, huh?”

With a grin wide enough to split his face, he nodded his more than enthusiastic agreement, before turning around.

_And heading the wrong way._

I cleared my throat. He stopped in his tracks and shot me a quizzical look over his shoulder.

“Uh. Aren’t you headed the wrong way, man?”

His grin returned full-force, accompanied by an eyebrow wiggle to match.

“Nuh uh. I’m the genius that found the keys,” and at this he magically produced said keys, jingling them in the air. “So, I’m pretty sure that means  _I_  get to drive her.”

He tilted his head, pondering  _her_  for an exaggerated second, then gave a nod and turned back to smile up at me oh-so-very sweetly. “Yup. I do.”

Before I could so much as utter one word, he was already ducking down, sliding onto the leather bench seat with a soft squeak, echoed not a second later with a much louder sound when he swung the door shut after him. I was left with my mouth hanging open, the unformed words dying a quick and painful death, as I found myself gawking at the miles and miles of gleaming jet black steel that seemed to presently be my only conversational partner. I promptly clamped my mouth shut and hurried around the passenger side, sliding in just as Dean was starting her up. The look of pure lust on his face at the sound of 8 cylinders of pure all-American gas-guzzling muscle growling into life would’ve been disturbing—if it wasn’t so damn hot. I looked away with an indignant huff.

“And when  _exactly_  were you planning on sharing this information with me, Dean?”

I was concentrating on looking out the window, or really, looking everywhere  _but_  at the smug expression that was sure to be plastered all over his stupid pretty little face. But still, it was hard to miss in his voice.

“Huh. I dunno, man. I could be losing it, but...I could  _swear_  that that’s what I just did.”

I rolled my eyes, slumping lower into the seat and staring at the window so damn hard that I half expected it to shatter any minute now.

“Jerk,” I muttered.

And his reply came back so quick, it almost gave me whiplash. “Bitch.”

But as to why that made me wanna grin like a fucking idiot on happy pills—well, I had no clue. I suppose it was the same reason I knew that I  _couldn’t_ ; the same reason that instead of giving in to the strange unexplainable urge to smile, I found myself pursing my lips so tight that they were practically going numb.

The same reason that his evil peals of laughter only made me press my lips together that much harder.


End file.
